Fabric, borders, laminating Oh My! Working on my bulletinboard.....plus a little contest/giveaway

So I spent the last few days looking for new borders for my bulletin board (apparently I left all my borders at my former school). Since I wanted to work on the bulletin board today I didn’t want to order it online. There is no teacher store in our state so I looked at the Dollar Tree and Staples. They had some, but I just wanted a nice lime green or sky blue color and I couldn’t find what I wanted. I went back to Staples yesterday and did find a yellow that I liked. Then yesterday while I was spending time with my mom and sister we went to Michael’s craft store and I was so excited when we walked in and they had a teacher section. I got the blue and green that I wanted. Who would have thought finding border would be so hard. 

  The  next hurdle was printing off some super hero themed things I got from TPT. My printer at home is old and out of the ink that I needed and since I had already spent money on classroom stuff this week buying a new printer or ink wasn’t a choice. So I decided to try and print some stuff off at my new school, but I know sometimes schools are pretty particular about printing color things and since I am the new girl I don't want to upset anyone. My old school I had a color laser printer in my classroom and got a little spoiled. So I was able to print the stuff that I needed (the principal was there and was super nice about me printing some stuff) and I used my own laminator to finish it. Below are the pictures of my bulletin board. There is still more work to do on it, but it’s a start.

I guess I should start taking my camera with me as my old iPhone isn't taking such beautiful pictures. 

I avoided the table in the middle today. It's got all the stuff I don't know what to do with on it. Guess that will be for next time. 

So in an attempt to increase the amount of comments on my blog I am going to giveaway a copy of my Write the Room 1 (see pic and link below) for every 5 comments there are. So if I have 1-5 comments I will give away one copy, if I have 6-10 comments I will giveaway 2 copies and so on. So please leave a comment about what you are doing this summer to relax or get ready school. The winner will be randomly drawn from all comments. One comment per person please. Since the prize is teaching material only comments from teachers/educators will count towards the total, but certainly my friends and family are invited to comment they just can’t win.

  Hope you are having a productive and enjoyable summer. Don’t forget to leave a comment.

~Erica

My classroom in progress.

So I went into my room today since my husband was at a training and my son was at basketball camp. I had only been there for about ½ hr when I got very overwhelmed. The amount of resources and stuff that the former resource room teaching had was crazy. The space that I have is significantly smaller than the space she had plus I have to share the resources with another teacher so to say trying to go through all that stuff was stressful was an understatement! Don’t get me wrong it is good to have lots of resources when you are working with struggling learners as you never know what tools you will need, but one of the workbooks I opened up was from 1978 (which is a good year, it’s the year I was born).

  So I made a plan to try to find the programs and resources that I had heard of or used in the past first. I organized those resources and then browsed the other stuff to see if there were other things I thought I might use. Anything I knew I wouldn’t use I left for the other teacher to go through when she comes in. I didn’t want to assume that she wouldn’t want to use it.

  Then I began the fun process of unpacking all the boxes from my kindergarten classroom. I actually made very good progress if you look at the pics from my last post and then look at these pics.

This is where the large pile of boxes use to be. Two of the boxes you see in the picture are actually empty I just hadn't taken care of the boxes yet. 

Sorry for the blurry pic. Oh my!

Yes it's starting to feel like my space :)

I also started to make the classroom look like my own, by putting up my family pictures (I really need to get some updated pics).

Love my family....and The Wizard of Oz!

Even my Ruby Red Shoes made it to my new classroom! I wonder what my new school will think when I wear these. :)

  Next I need to work on buying some fabric and superhero stuff. Also printing and laminating the superhero stuff I have bought from TPT.  Since my room is getting in order I am starting to feel better about this transition. I think I will have a lot to learn, but I am excited. I was happy to talk to a few teachers today and one in particular made me feel very welcome and seemed to understand that even though I made the choice to make a change that it is still difficult. I think her and I are going to get along just fine.

  Oh one difference I noticed about my new school…..they can leave toys on the playground and apparently they don’t get stolen. Seems like that is a good sign.

Hope you are enjoying your summer!

~Erica

Cleaning out my porch.

    Since June when I moved all of my stuff out of my old classroom my enclosed porch has been filled with boxes, shelves, and organizers. Well yesterday I moved all of the boxes to my new classroom and I had already moved the organizers. My porch is almost empty of school stuff except for two book shelves.  My husband is pretty happy to have most of the porch back. Here are the pictures of my classroom after I spent just a short time there yesterday.

This is a view of the room from the doorway. In the far left corner is where I am setting up my space. Right now there is a small rectangular table there, but my special education director is kindly ordering me a horseshoe table which will be better for direct instruction. One big bummer is that the whiteboard is not magnetic :( 

This picture shows the wall that is next to the door. There are a lot of shelves which is good because the shelves are already filled with stuff that was there before I arrived. There is actually a lot of stuff that belongs to that room so I will need to go through everything and organize. The boxes on the floor are ones from my old classroom. Lots to go through!

This is the right side of my classroom space. I have to put some more shelves or something against the divider so it’s not so wobbly.

     I really want my classroom space to still look like a real classroom. I am trying to decide on whether to stick to my fish theme or try something else. Any ideas?

     Oh, it seems that the resource room schedule that I created was received very well by the teachers that it impacts. Also when I went to school yesterday I got to meet three of the teachers in the building. They were all very nice and welcoming. Hoping that is a good sign that people will like me at my new school.

~Erica

And the change has begun!

A few weeks ago I attended a conference with my new school district. The attendees from the district were the special education director (my new boss), the school principal, the school district curriculum coordinator, and then little old me. Even though I was pretty intimidated by this it actually helped me to be comfortable with my new district. The conference was about collaborating and co-teaching between regular education and special education. It was very interesting. I left the conference feeling pretty good about the new district I was going to be working in and wanted to get started.

  The following week I started to get organized. I copied and pasted all of the students goals (common core aligned already phew) into a new document that was visually friendly, created a new lesson planning form that may or may not work (won’t know until I try it), and bought grade 1-4 Common Core I can statement posters on TPT  to have for each students’ goals.  The new form is below in case anyone wants to see if or give suggestions: 

I also created this direct instruction tracking form to make sure I am meeting and documenting the IEP requirements. That form is below.

  Then this week I got to meet up with the teacher that I am going to be sharing a classroom with at our new school. I am a little nervous about sharing space since I am use to having a whole classroom to myself, but the other teacher seems very nice so hopefully we will get along just fine.  We decided how the room would be split and now I just have to start getting it beautified! Pics of my new school and classroom are below.

This is my new school! It’s in the country and very quiet and peaceful.

Here is the entry way to the classroom. You can see the big divider that separates our classroom space. 

This is the other teachers side of the room.

This is my side of the room. It certainly needs a little work to make it inviting and organized. I will post pics as I put it together. 

     Yesterday I spent the better part of the morning trying to make a schedule that met the IEP requirements while not interfering with classroom time. So after a few hours I gave up on the pie in the sky idea that I could meet the needs of the IEP and the student would still not miss anything from their regular classroom. As a classroom teacher it's really hard to take a kid out of their regular ed classroom when I know they are missing something. But for better or worse that's all part of my new job. We will see how many regular education teachers get ticked off at me because of the schedule. I created a chart to help me plan. I posted it below. The colors are for different students and for their different IEP instructional requirements. You won't see the names that go along with the colors. The letters on the chart are the teachers first letter so they can look at it to see if there are any glaring issues. Wish me luck! 

Erica