Wednesday, September 5, 2012

School Starts Tomorrow!!

Whew!  Two days of staff development when by in a whirl! It sure had it's ups and downs too!  Tuesday was basically a day of school tool training, so I was involved with helping others get familiar with School Tool.  We also did the mandated anti-bullying training.

Today on the other hand, was an onslaught of ups and downs.  Yesterday at our faculty meeting, our new principal answered a few questions about A.P.P.R. and our SLO's that had me worried that she wouldn't let me use my own assessments that I had worked on ALL summer.  So, naturally, I was panicking a little until today when I met with her 1 on 1 and we reviewed my work.  PHEW!  She was impressed with what I created and as long as our superintendent will approve of them and she gets some of her own questions answered from Boces about assessments in general, I should be good to go with them!  Yea!!!!!

Then, I headed up a meeting between the special areas teachers about being consistent with our grading.  That was an interesting meeting to say the least.  If School Tool can build us a grade converter to convert our grades from our decided on, 5-letter grading scale to the set grading scale the K-2 teachers use, we will be all set!  It's way too much work to remember the grading scale used by those teachers, especially since they are SOOO different!  Two grades use 4 letters, the special education teacher uses 5, and the 2nd grade teachers use 4 letters with a combination of +'s and -'s!  Third through sixth grade uses number grades, so it should be easy-peasy for us to input grades.  Otherwise........people may not be happy...whether it's the special area teachers or the classroom teachers!  Eek!  Hopefully, this will all pan out...good thing this is a trial run year!

Otherwise, my classroom is just about set up!  I have one more thing to add to my door once it dries...and I just need to finish cutting out the Sudoku pieces and I need to finish creating my file folder games for early finishers.


Daily supplies...after the first week, the crayon boxes and colored pencil trays will be stacked on the window sill to conserve space.


My bottle cap sorting jugs!  I have one jug outside my room for people to drop their "donations" in.  Then, the second item on my list for students to do when they finish is to sort the caps from the hallway into the specific color jugs!


The finished early list!  Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with student rubrics/checklists for the back of projects.  Sometimes I feel a generic one just won't work!


Thanks to Mr. Curtis who brought all his favorite co-workers a little "good-luck-oh-my-goodness-the-students-are-here-tomorrow!" gift! ;)



3 comments:

  1. Okay I need to know...where did you get your colored bins for supplies?! I have been looking for something like this for my room, but can only find three maybe four different colors (and I have seven tables right now) Please tell me you ordered these from a website or something because I really want to be more organized this next year!

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    1. I actually couldn't find them in all the colors I needed. I did find the supply bins at Target in 3 colors. I had the crayon boxes already at school, and the colored pencil bins are the Crayola colored pencil trays that I bought the year before. I went to Walmart and bought the plastic spray paint and spray painted everything the colors I wanted. I think all together the spray paint ended up costing me about $25 and I got the bins for $2 each. A little expensive, but I have spray paint left over to re-coat the bins at the end of this year. I also couldn't find purple spray paint, so i had to alternate between blue and red to get the purple color.

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