Bring on the 2011-2012 School Year

Tomorrow I start my 36th year of teaching and I'm so excited I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep. I want to be in bed by 9 o'clock so that I am ready for a fantastic first day.

I went to school on Saturday for about four hours to put the finishing touches on my classroom. It's funny that it took so long to prepare this year, but I reorganized a lot of my resources so that I am better prepared this year. Last year I started in one classroom and then had to move to the classroom next door after my new Promethean board finally got installed. I never felt totally settled in last year because some of my stuff never got moved out of my old classroom until this summer. Mainly it was my two file cabinets and my classroom library that didn't get moved until a few weeks ago.

Since I have been a math and social studies teacher for the last few years instead of a language arts teacher, I wasn't sure what to do with my huge collection of library books. Well, this year I am letting our newest 4th grade teacher, Amy Vega, take over many of my library books for her room. Since she needed a file cabinet, I only moved one into my classroom. I threw out or gave away lots of resources that I am not using anymore. It felt good to clean out those old files and get reorganized.

I am looking forward to meeting the 27 new students who will be in my homeroom this year tomorrow morning. We will not be changing classes on the first day, so I will be introducing them to our set of netbooks and getting them started on a blogging project. Hopefully by the end of the week they will have completed their first blog posts ever. Here is my lesson plan I hope they have fun with it.