NEW

Yesterday (Sunday) I went into my classroom and was planning on getting organized and prepared for the upcoming week. Instead, I spent the next six hours rearranging furniture and cataloging my books.

I generally rearrange student desks/teams every quarter, but this time I didn't stop with the kids' desk. I traded in my "big" table for a skinnier one and finally moved in the shelf from the room next door that I was using. I set up my five-armed lamp and moved some book shelves around, too.

[Insert new classroom pictures here]

There was a part in my room where the book shelves blocked a small area out of my sight, and one of my students has been drawn to that place in the past few weeks. So I knew I had to address that issue. In doing so, I found that I needed to reorganize my classroom library due to the vast amount of new books I had collected since the start of the year.

[Insert new bookshelf pictures here]

When my kids arrived today, I had them all sit on the rug. I didn't pay much attention to where I positioned the kids, so I knew I had some tweaking to do before they settled in. After a few minutes of assessing who was seated with whom, I moved a few students next to friends so that they had the opportunity to be with buddies before we got into testing season where everyone will be their own island for two weeks.

In going along with the new room, we proceeded to take the rest of the morning to clean out all of our subject folders and desks. It was a good process for the class, and I think it got them feeling refreshed.

We threw out old papers and failed ideas. Students relived 100% spelling tests and found long-lost library books. One of my kids found a cutie that was given to him on Halloween. It was pretty gross.

Although it took a good chunk of our morning, we still found time to do our Math Fluency progress monitoring before heading off to Art.

***This blog post is part of my new month's resolution to tweet and blog more***