One Day at a Time

 
The first three days of school are over.

My kids are awesome.

But dang.  I am so tired.

After hours of planning with my other 1st grade co-teacher we found out the day before school started that we had reached the magical 28 children.  Just enough to officially split us into two independent classes and gain one T.A. to share between the classes.  All our planning, our daily schedule we had developed, our system of organizing materials, all our time and efforts went straight out the window.  We suddenly went from being on top of things and ready for the first days to feeling like we needed another week to re-plan everything.

There were a few moments during that day-before-the-first-day-of-school as I was trying to redo as much as I could in just a few hours where I got that huge sinking feeling in my stomach and felt for a second like I was going to throw up.  I knew I couldn't redo everything in that one afternoon.  So I just focused on the first day of school.  I wanted it to go smoothly for the kids and I knew I would have this lovely long weekend to do all the re-planning that needed to happen.  The first day went pretty well and I spent the afternoon looking at our plans for days two and three and redoing them where needed.

All in all, things have been frustrating, stressful, and sometimes so ridiculous you just have to laugh.  The kids seemed to have a good first week, though, and that's what really matters. 

I spent this morning redoing our daily schedules.  Normally, each 1st grade class has their own T.A. to help with our Language Arts block and teach Bible.  Since there are so few kids this year, the school board only approved one T.A. for both classes to share.  That means that we had to have Bible at different times and coordinate our Language Arts block so our T.A. would only be needed in one classroom at a time.

It was quite complicated.

I finally managed to work out a schedule that I think will work.  We'll see.

There's still more to do, but at least some stuff is getting straightened out.  Never a dull moment :-P

Oh, and P.S.
Do you know how I know that school has really started?

I went 11.5 hours on Friday without going to the bathroom.  5:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., baby.

Back in the saddle again...

What do teachers do?

As I begin this third year of teaching, I realized that I forgot to do something I promised myself I would do at the beginning of my first and second years of teaching!  When I walked into my classroom two(ish) weeks ago and looked around at the blank bulletin boards...

 stacks of desks and chairs...

the stuffed closet...

and I wondered,

"Where do I start with all this?!"  

 

What should I do first?  What all do I need to do?  I know I'll need to buy new stuff...but what all do I need to get?  Wouldn't it be nice if I had a pre-made To Do list for all the beginning of the year things that need doing?

"I should make a list as I go," I tell myself.  Then, next year I'd have that To Do list!  Unfortunately by the time that thought crosses my mind, I've already unloaded three boxes from the closet, put up half my calendar board, organized some desk supplies, and several other things that I can't quite remember.  So the Beginning of the Year Master To Do List has been postponed yet again.  Oh, well!

Sometimes people ask what I have to do to get ready for a new year (or a new week!) of school; or why I go in to school so early (I usually start back about a week before the official teacher work days start).  They can't fathom what in the world could take so much time.  I won't tell you everything that I do (obviously--I can't remember everything anyway!), but I will tell you something I did this weekend that took hours (even with Matt helping me for part of it).

At the beginning of the year, we get a huge shipment of new workbooks for the kids.  Each kid gets a spelling book, a phonics workbook, and four (yes, four) math workbooks--one for each quarter.  All the pages come in a bound, paperback book.  We don't give the books to the kids (too much for a 1st grader), so we tear out the pages.  Then we can hand out just the page they'll need for the day's lesson.  

Let's do some math, shall we?

Each student gets...

4 workbooks...

each workbook has 150 pages...

and we have 26 students this year.

So that equals...?

15,600 pages

That is a lot of pages to tear.  Now, I'm not crazy.  There is no way on earth that I would tear out that many pages and file them.  I hand off most of the work to eager parent volunteers.  However, we begin using the math workbooks on the fourth day of school, so I need to have several pages ready to go.  I also don't want to start the year with an email to parents asking for a huge favor right off the bat.  So I worked on tearing and organizing pages from just the first of the four workbooks.  It's enough for the 1st quarter.  But even with just one book, it's 150 pages for each of 26 students.  That's still 3,900 pages to tear out.

I tore out all the pages on Saturday afternoon.  Matt helped a little bit with this part, but...well, he's not the best with tearing along perforated lines.  So I told him he could help with step two.  After I was finished tearing, I looked at my big stack of papers.  26 stacks of pages for 26 students.  Now I needed to organize them--because I'll be handing out all the page 1s for the first math lesson.  I needed stacks consisting of all the page ones, all the page twos, all the page 100s, etc.  Matt helped me make stacks of the pages and paper clipped them together.  

In total, it probably took us about 3 hours to tear, stack, and organize all these pages.  Now they're sitting in my blue crate ready to be taken back to the school on Monday and filed into my filing cabinet.  All nice and neat.  

So that's one of the things I get to do at the beginning of the school year.  It's a lot of work, but it all ends up getting done :-)