My First Day of School

All ready for my big teaching debut!

I know what you must be thinking... the first day of school? This is October 13th?! Well, yes, yes it is. But if you ask any other first-year teacher, they would agree that you probably don't have time to blog about the first day of school until the first quarter is done. And the grading period ends tomorrow.

So with that said, I shall now fill you in on the biggest change I've had these past two and half months. I was hired as a second grade teacher five days before the first day of school last August. Needless to say, Shaun and I had a very hectic five days up at the school, setting up the classroom and running errands all over town to buy teaching supplies.

We clocked a couple 14-hour days, but we did take one evening to go out and celebrate my new job. We went to this cute restaurant in Panama City called the Granite Cafe and had a great dinner. Shaun has a coworker whose band actually played at the restaurant that night, so we listened to them for a while too. The picture below is of us at the restaurant.

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But now for the tour of my classroom!

This is the front door and my class library corner. The chart by the door is my Character Counts behavior system.

My computer stations and some of the students' desks. They're no longer in this shape though. All the kids are now in table groups of 4.

The view from the back of the room toward the board.

This is our class job chart. Each child's name is on an envelope that passes from mailbox to mailbox each day. I thought it was really cute and one of my favorite buys. :)

The writing center table is on the left in the back. You can see the reading rug in front of my desk too. It's now in the front center of the room, but same principle. :)

Our class Word Wall. Since I was fairly low on wall space (They put me in an older grade's room, so it's not as big as a 2nd grade classroom should be, but I made do.), I borrowed this idea from another teacher. The ribbons hang down and I velcro the sight words onto them alphabetically. It was very labor-intensive to make, but Shaun did a great job with it!

This is my little corner. I'm almost never back here, but it's there nonetheless. The roses were given to me at orientation from one of my students... how cute is that?

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Well there you have it, friends... my first classroom of my teaching career! Hopefully I'll post more pictures with a more updated setup, but this helps give you a general idea for now.