Saturday School Bargains

I happened upon a fellow elementary teacher's garage sale this morning.  She used to teach 4th grade, but now she is teaching 2nd, so she was selling a lot of her upper elementary books and supplies.  I managed to buy eight Mailbox magazines (which I LOVE to use), eight novels for my classroom library, one book of reproducible poems, and two nearly brand new small stuffed animals to add to one of my class auctions.  The grand total was... $4.50!  Pretty good, considering any one of those items would have been at least that much or more had I bought them new!

Packing Up My Classroom #4

Problem #4:  It is always overwhelming when I walk back into my classroom to prepare for the new school year.  I know that I have a million things to do on top of teacher meetings and lesson plans.  However, despite the fact that I've done it before, I have trouble remembering what all needs to be done before that first day!

How I've Done It Before - I'm a big list person.  I love to make to-do lists and check things off, one by one.  Usually, during that first week, I make a list of things to do as I remember them.  This takes time, though, and my time that first week back is extremely valuable.  Besides, I often end up using my time inefficiently because I don't have a complete list to start the week.  I lose little bits of time, here and there, because I haven't thought of all the little things that need to be done. 

How I Did It This Year - This year, I pulled out a sheet of paper as I packed up my classroom.  Every time I thought of something that would need to be done in the fall, I wrote it on the paper.  This way, I will have a list as soon as I return to school.  I put the completed list in my box of things that I know I'll need when I return to my room in August so that I don't have to worry about losing it.  This will make it easy for me to scan the list to pick out a couple things to do at home each night (name tags, attendance lists, etc.)  Plus, it will help me to make sure that I don't forget anything, only to remember it the morning of orientation, or worse, the morning of the first day of school!

Does anyone else have any great, sensible ideas to prepare for the next school year as you finish up this year?

Packing Up My Classroom #3

Problem #3:  I always stock up on school supplies in July and August when the stores have amazing sales, but then I can never find them when I need them! 

How I've Done It Before - When I pack up my classroom, I generally come across all the school supplies that I bought in the fall but didn't end up using during the year.  They are put in various places in my desk, closet, etc.  However, the next fall, I generally end up buying more of those same supplies because I don't have a good idea of what I currently have.  Sometimes, it seems like the more supplies I have, the harder it is to keep track of what I actually need. 

How I Did It This Year - This year, I decided to corral all of my extra supplies into one place... you guessed it, one of my bank boxes!  I sorted out the supplies and put them in small boxes (leftover from baby wipes, old art boxes students left behind, etc.) so that I would have easy access to them later in the year.  I even went through supplies that I had at my desk.  I do not need 20 highlighters or 10 packs of sticky notes at one time!  I packed up my extras and put everything in the big box for storage.  Now, when every single red pen I own disappears, I'll know where to look for a new one!


Tomorrow's Problem - How to make preparation for the next school year less overwhelming when I return in August...

Summer Reading (It's not just for students!)

Last summer, I decided to start listening to books on cd.  At the time, we did not have a dishwasher in our apartment, and since washing dishes by hand was far from one of my favorite tasks, I thought that some audiobooks might make the chore less awful.  Being an avid reader, one of the hardest things for me to do was to pick out a book that I didn't mind not reading.  To me, listening to a book read to me is not nearly as wonderful as reading it myself.

However, I stumbled upon a book about teaching by a man named Rafe Esquith.  I'm a sucker for tales of teachers who go into underprivileged areas and prove that being poor is not a lid on a child's ability to succeed.  This book was a story of just that kind of teacher.  The book is called Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire, and it contains numerous excellent ideas for a classroom. 

This past year, I implemented the monetary system he described, complete with desk rent, supply costs, and an auction at the end of each quarter.  I made it a little simpler than his to keep me sane, but my students loved it!  I enjoyed watching them manage their meager salaries, some using it up on candy every Friday, others saving it to outbid the entire class on that one auction item everyone wanted.  We even voted on taxes and collected them in April.  This was far more effective than the mini-economies I had tried to do in the past.  I put more ownership on the students, only loosely tied it to behavior, and taught some practical economic lessons along the way.

I highly recommend this book if you are looking for something to get you excited about the next school year.  I would have found it overwhelming if I had read it during the year, simply because I find it difficult to start too many new things once the year is already started.  It made for great summer reading (er... listening), though, because I was able to take away from it some good ideas to try out the next year, and I had plenty of time to figure out how to use those ideas and make them my own for my own classroom. 

If you still aren't sure, check out the website for his class, The Hobart Shakespeareans.  It's quite amazing what he has accomplished!

Packing Up My Classroom #2

Problem #2:  When I pack up my classroom at the end of the year, I always come across extra name tags, labels for folders, and other odds and ends that I know I'll need in two and a half months when I start to put my room back together for a new class.  The problem is, how do I keep track of those things so that I can find them in the fall?

How I've Done It Before - Usually, I just put these items back where I found them.  Then, in August, I usually spend a good amount of time looking for them unsuccessfully.  When I give up, I go out and buy new things, only to find my extras three days later, after I've opened, written on, laminated, and stapled all the new things I bought.

How I Did It This Year - This year, as I went through all the school year rubble that had accumulated in my room for the last 9 months, I set aside anything I'd need when I started putting things back up before the new school year.  I found a medium-sized plastic container that I'd emptied of something else, and into it I tossed all the extra name tags, monkeys, bananas (I have a monkey themed classroom), chore labels, etc. that I had found.  I know that this will save me some time and money in August because I will know right where these items are!

Tomorrow's Problem - What to do when you have 200 red pens, but you don't know where any of them are!

Packing Up My Classroom

Every year I do the same basic things to pack up my classroom for the summer, and every year I come back in the fall wishing I'd done it differently.  This year, I did!  It may be that as you read this post, you think to yourself, "Really?  It's taken her several years to figure this out?" but perhaps, instead, you are like me.  You don't always see the most obvious solutions to a problem until you've faced that problem multiple times.  So, here are the new ideas I put into practice this year to help make life easier at the end of August when I start putting my classroom back together for a new year.

Problem #1:  I always clear my desk off at the end of the year and pack everything away.  School policies vary about this, but most schools do some sort of work within the classrooms during the summer break.  Since I'd rather not come back to dust and paint flecks coating the items that I keep on my desk, I always make sure that everything is hidden away.


How I've Done It Before - I always reorganize my desk at the end of the school year, so I usually have extra space where I've cleared out book order catalogs, student files, and extra copies of everything.  In the past, I've filled up these nooks and crannies with all the items off the top of my desk.  Anything that didn't fit in my desk ended up on my bookshelves or in my utility closet.  It's a great idea, if you are trying to use as little space as possible.  However, when I come back in the fall, I never know where anything is!  I can't find my stapler or my hole punch or even my flip calendar with funny quotations for each day of the year.  It's really annoying!  Plus, in the process of finding all those things, I have to rummage through everything, leaving my desk unorganized again.  It never seems to get properly organized again until the end of that school year, at which point I fill it up with all my desktop items, and the cycle starts all over again.

How I Did It This Year - This year, I had a light bulb moment while organizing my desk!  There was no reason to put everything in my desk or in my closet.  It would make much more sense to put all those items in a box, label it as desktop items, and leave it in my room for storage.  We are allowed to leave boxes of items in our rooms over the summer, as long as they are labeled.  So, off to Office Max I went, and I bought a 10 pack of bank boxes (you know, the cardboard ones where you fold and bend them into existence) for about $13.  Now, I look forward to going back to my classroom and unpacking my desk in a very short amount of time!  Plus, I found a number of other uses for those wonderful boxes!

Tomorrow's Problem - Effectively Saving Materials for Next Year