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