Classroom Setup 101/2012I

I have begun. The fun part of getting ready for a new year. The silent, calm classroom. No. one. in. the. hall.

I just went in to do a couple little of straightening and organizing. But, you know, one thing leads to another leads to another.

I decided to make a couple more banners to label the reading anchor charts and the weekly words. Which led to moving the calendar and the set of lights.

I don't have a picture of the lights because, well, someone may have forgotten to charge the batteries for the camera. ('That is another story).  

The one little project I thought I could accomplish in no time at all was to finish labeling and leveling the fiction /author/section of my library. I started this project while my student teacher was teaching. Which may have been a few minutes here and there project that wasn't successful. I do have excuses--one being that my color cartridge was out on my school printer. And since those babies cost $40 I kept putting it off and off and off. I found out by reading a blog that Amazon has some reasonable prices so I managed to purchase two for $5 each., Total with shipping was $15 and I received them. Back to my story--I did finish one section but it took longer than I expected.

A return address label is placed on each book with a picture that matches the one on the basket. The color dot is the AR level we use. I'm also going through each basket and getting rid of  donating extra copies of books to a new teacher. The baskets were so full the kids couldn't even tell what we had.

I use yellow baskets for fiction, aqua baskets for non-fiction, and blue for author sets. I moved the author's set below the READ banner. (On top will be learning stations.)

So, step one! 

Tonight is relaxing time. Our power has been off not one but two nights this week. We had a horrible storm about 3 p.m. yesterday. It knocked down three huge trees and a power pole in our neighborhood. We didn't realize it was this bad. But the power company worked all night --yes all night--to get our power on by around nine this morning. My Kindle was not fully charged. My cell phone wasn't charged. The two things that I could have used to weather the storm weren't much help. So, tonight I have a date with my Kindle!