Yesterday I went to my friend Amy's fifth grade classroom for her first look at what her year will be like next year. She also has a blog (and is a far better writer than I) that will chronicle her first year of teaching fifth grade. It is: juiceboxesandcrayolas.blogspot.com. Anyway, helping her go through the things left behind by the previous teacher and move furniture around renewed my excitement about the approaching school year. In just 2 short weeks I will begin new teacher training, and I'm really looking forward to it. In the meantime, however, I've got a lot of work to do.


(An approximate floorplan of my classroom)
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Projects for the coming weeks:
Create a classroom profile inventory to get to know the kids and have their info at-a-glance style.
Create a reading log, photocopy, and bind for kids.
Create a calendar for kids to keep track of minutes read every month
Draft and put up bulletin boards
Go through stuff left in my classroom - i.e. science materials, math manipulatives
Organize classroom library

And that's just the short list...

There's something so overwhelming about an empty space. While I"m not going into this position blindly by any means, there is still a great deal of unknown for a teacher. I'm hoping some of the mysteries will be revealed in the coming weeks.