Teaching--Behind the Scenes

Time to head back to school already. Where did summer go? I was just getting started!
I thought you might like to see a little of what goes on behind the scenes as I get ready for the first week of school. Today I drove out to my classroom (30 miles away). I took along my two granddaughters to help. (They were such big helpers!) The oldest granddaughter is going into second grade which is what I teach so she was especially excited to help.

We got there around 9:30 and stayed until a little after 3:00. We took 20 minutes for lunch. That was our only break except for a quick snack for the girls around 10:30.

When I walked in my room I was pretty shocked to see all of the boxes. We are using new science materials this year. I teach science to all of the 2nd graders so I get to store the materials in my room. (I haven't figured out where that's going to be yet!)

The girls and I worked on putting up new bulletin boards, labeling reading and spelling workbooks. I laminated a bunch of stuff for the bulletin boards,name tags,math charts,etc. The girls worked hard cutting all of that out.

At the end of the year I have to pack up all of the stuff on my bookshelves so the cleaning staff can move them to clean over the summer. (You can see the paper boxes lining the back wall.) So we unpacked many boxes of books, game and misc. items and put them back on the bookshelves.

We didn't get everything done that I would have liked. I brought hours of work home to do before next week. (If I lived closer I would just have gone back in another day.) Our adminstration has lots of meetings planned for next week but we will have some time to work in our classrooms. That time will be spent preparing lessons for the first week of school and getting ready for Open House on Wed. night.

(A little note, none of us get paid for the time we put in getting our classrooms ready.)

I'll take pics after I have everything ready to go for the first day of school. Hopefully, it looks much better than this! :)