Pre-Plan Week!

 Hello again, 

For those that may not know, teachers normally get the week before school starts to prepare their classroom and go to an endless amount of meetings that could have been emails. This year, because so many schools are starting late and are giving up professional development days, we had two single days of professional development and then this past Tuesday through Friday to work in our rooms and go to school site meetings. It was the most time I have ever had in my to prepare a room. This could possibly because I couldn't decorate like I normally would because there are three other teachers in my room and we all focus on separate things, but I'm calling this a win! 

Even though I had a great deal of time, my room isn't completely finished yet. Schools are used to having a surplus of desks from one school to another. Children tend to be born in waves and one to two grades may be very large while the grades behind them are smaller and so forth and so on. Those desks and tables end in up either the school sites storage area, or at the county surplus depot. Well since we are seeing a drastic cut in numbers and everyone trying to get every last inch of space in their room, the depot has been filled to capacity and so has most school storage sites. Which leaves me with 12 desks in the back of my room stacked on top of one and other and two tables waiting to go somewhere. I am waiting for someone to tell me they are a fire hazard honestly and then I'm not really sure what I can do about it, but that is a problem for future Ms. ELA.

With all the "extra" time I had, I was able to help a lot of teachers with some virtual learning tricks that I have picked up over the summer, and from my previous school (which was a one to one school district for Chromebooks). It felt really nice to safely interact with my colleagues and be able to shared some helpful knowledge. I am currently teaching at the middle school I went to school at, and a good majority of my teachers are still there. This puts me in an odd predicament in most meetings because it's very difficult to get out of the student/teacher roles that were defined so long ago 😂  I am hoping that all of our students turn in their Chromebook permission forms so they can get Chromebooks on Monday or Tuesday. I can wait to see the Digital Notebooks used by everyone!

I am spending my last "free" weekend with my friends saying a found farewell to freedom. I'm not going to hang out with them in person once school starts out of caution because they live with those that are considered high risk or are high risk themselves. We decided collectively that being on the opposite side of the room from others or being spread out in our cafe was good enough for them. I can't even imagine what our hallways are going to look like come Monday though. Lots of sardine moments I'm betting.  

I'm going to try and post my reaction to the first day of school, but I may fall asleep in my chair after our dismissal bell rings so we will see how well that works. Song for the year though is definitely "Into the Unknown" from Frozen two. I think I'm going to play it as the kids enter and do our first writing activity about it.