Setting Up My Classroom!

Hi, Teachers!

I've been moving a lot of stuff around in my room, and I'm really excited about it. Unfortunately, I've been unable to get into my school for the past 2 days, but I should be able to get back in tomorrow afternoon. I plan to finish my file cabinet then. I'm so excited! it looks SO awesome so far! Here's what it looks like at the moment:

I wasn't going to paint the hardware, but I realized the person who has this before me painted it. It was preeeeeeeeeetty ugly looking, so I had to make it all blue! You can see what this awful thing looked like before if you look at the picture below. You can see how the handle has a bit of paint left on it.

YUCK! All I have to do now is add contact paper to the doors and the top, and I'll be done! My contact paper is sitting in my bag right now waiting to go to school. :)

I also cleaned my Sterilite organizer. I'm so glad, because it needed a good clean. I just used a magic eraser and got so much dirt out of it. Look at the before and after:

  

Before... yuck!

After... all clean! :)

Another project I dealt with which was pretty awesome was my mailboxes. Each year, I put labels on my mailboxes with my students' names. I have put new labels on top of old labels for a little while, but frankly, it was getting really old and dingy looking. Well, after a bit of scraping, I had the brilliant idea to put some washi tape (I LOVE WASHI TAPE!) on the plastic parts. Now, I'll be able to put new labels on and it will look *awesome* ! I'm neurotic, I know, but it was really bothering me. You can see how much better it looks already.

I'm thinking I'll also put some of the chevron contact paper on the top or sides and finish the whole mailbox off with some more washi tape. I got my tape on sale at Michael's for 5 bucks for several rolls. I'd recommend checking it out!

I also FINALLY got all of the big pieces of furniture out of my closet! WAHOOOOO!!! Now all I have to do is clear off the two shelves in the closet.

Once my filing cabinet is finished, I won't have those files on my window sill anymore. I figure there's no point in putting them in my cabinet just to take them out again. I also put a few jobs I want to accomplish next time I'm in my classroom on my easel. I find when I do that, I'm much more productive. When I go to school over the summer without a plan in mind, I can get a bit overwhelmed with how cray cray my room looks!

Anyway, that's that for now. I just got my schedule for the year, and I have to try to plan what my days are going to look like. This year, we moved from 40 minute class periods all day to two 60 hour class periods for reading and writing and 40 minute class periods for the rest of the day. We didn't add any more time in our day though, so other class periods are 25 minutes. Ahhh! It's so confusing. I can't imagine how much more confusing this was for the people creating the master schedules for the school.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have some new classroom updates! :) For my New Jersey teachers: What are you doing in your classroom right now? For all of the other teachers who have already started school: What are you thinking about trying for the first time this year? Comment below!