A FIRE!

I am so tired of losing everything I write on this bloody computer! Anyway. Sunday night we had a fire at our school. A security light on the roof short wired and caused a classroom to catch on fire. It destroyed the room totally! And the sprinklers went off, preventing the fire from spreading in our old wooden school, thank goodness, but it did cause water damage. Today we spent the day looking at a local Catholic school to see if we could use it as a temporary building, but after talking with the recovery staff it appears that the building will be ready for Monday except for two rooms! So we are NOT going to relocate for only a couple of days. We will remained closed this week and help the two teachers relocate their classrooms..the bottom line? I will probably be losing my classroom in the meantime. I am a specialist and not a classroom teacher so my room makes the most sense to use as a relocation room. It is temporary so it will be fine. It is necessary. So, I will be back in a couple of days with some more info. cindi

the paperwork is alive!

Hey everyone, MY GOODNESS there is a ton of paperwork at the beginning of the school year. I got all of my littles tested except for one. Now I need to do the "biggens." But today my partner teacher reminded me of a few things we needed to get done. Since I do most of the emails and computer work, I got started. Step one, cross reference three different caseload lists from three different sources. OH MY! By doing that I learned I have two more kiddos who speak NO ENGLISH AT ALL arriving in a few days. So that led me to double checking and finding other new students. UGHHH. SO basically, I was doing scheduling and paperwork stuff all day. I didn't see a single student. I want to finish my benchmarking, but all of this stuff had to be taken care of. AHHHHHH I love my job, I even love my paperwork sometimes, but I don't love benchmarking time with the biggins...course the littles are fun..Takes all of ten minutes.:) SO here's to a day tomorrow spent with kiddos and not my computer! cindi

Purging is such sweet Relief

Ahhhh, It is such a wonderful thing to purge oneself of junk. I threw away and gave away a LOT of stuff today. Posters I hadn't even looked at for two years are gone, blocks, math manipulatives, STUFF! I don't have a classroom per se, so I do not need them. I gave a lot of things to two new teachers in our building, so I feel that I did some good. This weekend I designed new covers for our union rep team. I loved the ones I saw on craftybycindy so I adapted it for our team. I also did a back with education quotes. I was pretty impressed, though next year I will make them with different designs. Here are Cindy's which can be found at craftsbycindy@blogspot.com:

o and here is my version. Sorry, the sun was shining onto the lamination and I was using my iphone so not the best pics."

I also put together some notebooks. One for each of the ELL team members...I only got a shot of one because I already gave them out to use. ANd I also put together a teachers notebook..again pics aren't the best but they really are neat! Man, I spent a lot of time putting these together. I really want to look into taking a graphic design class. SO here they are...til tomorrow, cindi

so that was my notebook and an inside divider page. My theme this year is sunflowers, so I love some of the photos I found. this is the ELL notebook and one of the divider pages:

SUMMER IS OVER

Evening everyone, In a few hours I will be returning to school for our first official day of school. Yes, we start really late in Maine, even later in Portland. Our teacher contracts start on Sept 1, so it guarantees that more often than not, we start after Labor Day. We have two days and then the kiddos come. YEAH!!! I wanted to join the MONDAY MADE IT linksy party that Tara at 4th Grade Frolics hosts.
I am new to the blogging world. SO not sure I even know how to link. But I'm gonna try! (I also would LOVE to have more than 7 people ( 6 are family I think) reading my blog! So here goes.... This year we have three new teachers. I wanted to do something very simple (read inexpensive) for them. SO I copied this great idea on Pinterest. It is from CUte as a Fox teacher',s blog..www.cuteasafox.com. ANyway, I thought they came out pretty cute...

Gotta go get ready....make breakfast, make lunch,. take care of clothes...etc Okay, so I also want to try and link up to Oh Boy 4th Grade's September currently...let's see if it works nope...cannot figure out how to post the link and then type into it. Maybe next time.