Summa Time!

I love the summer holidays, I really do. Last summer was my first summer off, no more stinky summer camps for this real teacher!

But back to the end of the year, it was fabulous. We all had heaps of fun and enjoyed showing off all our (their) talents at our first annual "Show and Shine". Our special day included a performance of "Peter and the Wolf" that was written and directed by our fantastic grade 12 volunteer (another bonus of working at a K to 12 school, high school volunteers!), oral readings of our favourite creative writing stories and numerous projects set up around the room. The kids, and I, were exhausted and very happy to go to the water park to enjoy the sunny weather after all our excitement. A wonderful wrap up to our year!

And now... I miss them all something terrible! But, I suppose I'll be seeing them back at school soon enough, along with a few new grade 2 faces (8 to be exact).

I've been spending some time in my classroom writing supply shopping lists, organizing my curriculum for this coming year and arranging the room. I decided I'd take a few seconds to show you two of my favourite time savers...

First, my solution to the pencil sharpening dilemma.

I have four cups (actually a cutlery organizer from IKEA!) to hold a few things... the first cup, the blue one, is for lost and found pencil crayons, crayons, markers, pencils and erasers. The second, the green cup, is for lost and found bigger items like scissors. The third cup, the purple one, is for dull/broken pencils and the last cup, the black one, is for fresh sharp pencils. At the beginning of the year I get the students to give me all their pencils (unless they're super special ones) and I put them in my supply cubbie. I take out a handful of pencils, enough for approximately 4 pencils per student and put them in the pencil bins. Now when a pencil breaks there is no need to sharpen it and disrupt the whole class, the student can just trade in their broken one for a new sharp one. I hate being interrupted to be asked to sharpen a pencil (especially since all I have is an electric sharpener and it's noisy!) and now it's one student's job at the end of the day to sharpen all the dull pencils. I found that this worked really well and the students really enjoyed being on "pencils" for their job too!

Second, I have folders... I'm still perfecting this one.

I have a slot and folder for each day of the week. I liked this system but found it hard to keep tidy as it was just a little too easy to just shove anything in there to get it off my desk! I'm pretty sure I'll keep a variation of this for this year though... maybe instead of days of the week I could do subjects? Hmm...

Anyways, back to summer time activities... like cleaning my house for when my parents get here later today!