Letter of the Week: Rr

I hate minimum days! We were on minimum day schedule all week for parent conferences and I felt like I was hardly able to get anything done... At least my conferences went well! With a four day week coming up next week, I'm feeling a little crunched for time. Luckily Rr is a pretty high frequency letter so even though I couldn't spend as much time on it as I would have liked this week, my students will have many opportunities to see it again. Following a similar line of thought, the Letter of the Week next week will be Tt, another high frequency letter. This way, I figure losing a day for Labor Day won't be so bad.

Letter of the Week: Aa

Parent conferences started last Friday and I tried to get as much testing done as possible so that I could have goals ready to discuss with parents during conferences. The kindergarten team at my school uses RESULTS. We test for the following:

Room 13

Hello friends! I survived my first week and then some of school and boy was it tough, but incredibly satisfying. I have never been so happy while being so tired at the same time.

First year teacher tip #283: Be prepared to stay late, really late, especially if you are teaching kinder. I forgot just how much prep goes into all the various crafts and activities.

Setting up my classroom required lots of thinking and resources. Being the teacher of the overflow class, my room was sparse with resources and smaller than the other kindergarten classrooms. Not to mention I had a whopping two days to get my classroom going - certainly not the ideal situation for my first year of teaching. Regardless of the circumstances, I had to make it work. I'm a teacher. Shame on me if I haven't learned to be flexible and pretend like it was on the lesson plan by now. With that said, welcome to Room 13! Here are some snapshots of the bare essentials that I put up to get my room started for the year.

The Big Day

Tomorrow is my first day as a kindergarten teacher! I have been working my tail off these past couple days buying supplies, rearranging furniture, and planning my curriculum (slowly but surely!). I'm hoping to get my room looking a lot nicer than it looks now. Wednesday kind of crept up on me so I was forced to put some things up that really weren't quite ready to go up yet. Right now I am overwhelmed with excitement and extremely eager to meet my new students and start this year. I'm already a week and a half behind the other classrooms but I have very high expectations and goals for my kinders. It's going to be a great first year!

High Five

Good afternoon friends! Just like that, another week has flown by. It was another frenetic week as I scrambled around San Diego to officially get cleared to teach. Here are my five favorite things from this past week.

Someone Pinch Me

Anyone who even remotely knows me will tell you how much I LOVE kindergarten and have dreamed of having my own kindergarten classroom one day. Well, my dream came true faster than even I expected! I had only been subbing for a week when my principal approached me and offered me an interview for a classroom teacher position (and to think, I thought I was in trouble!). Today I went in for the interview and I cried when I listened to the voicemail left on my phone just a few hours after I had interviewed. I was actually at dinner with a few of my colleagues and they forced me to listen to the voicemail at the dinner table. I'm so glad they did!

"Hi Karen, I was calling to let you know that your team at IH was very impressed with your interview today and we are offering you a contract for one year to teach kindergarten at IH."

I think I've listened to the message a thousand times since I left the restaurant. I can't believe everything that has happened in the last two weeks. Everything has fallen into place and I am so grateful and feel so fortunate for this opportunity. Not too many twenty-one year olds can say they've snagged their dream job. I am so proud and honored to be able to say that I have. The only downside is that I will be leaving my 5th/6th graders who I have really bonded with in the last week. Luckily, I am at the same school and I plan on letting them know that in no way am I abandoning them, but that this is a life-long goal I have worked for ever since I was six years old. I know they will understand and I plan on keeping my new classroom open for tutoring after school so that I can still support them.

P.S. I just got off the phone with my parents and they told me they're doing the whole shake-and-pop-open-the-champagne-bottle in the backyard of our home right now in Los Angeles, HAHA. What a beautiful day. I couldn't be happier. Work hard and never give up! Dreams really do come true. Good night friends!

High Five

Happy Sunday everyone! Today I enjoyed an incredibly relaxing day at home. The first of its kind in a long while if I do say so myself. I thought I would post five things, in no particular order, that I really enjoyed from this past week in keeping with the carefree theme of the day.

Park It Like Its Lot

Hi friends! My first week of subbing has come to an end and what a week it's been! My GATE combo class is such a joy to teach, but it certainly comes with its own unique set of challenges. I would say the greatest challenge I faced this week was teaching math to both grade levels by myself. Since it was the first week of school, I didn't have an Impact teacher to take one of the grade levels to work with in a separate room. I can't imagine how teachers teach combo classes without any push-in support. Luckily, my students were learning about place value this week and so the content was fairly similar between the grades, with sixth graders studying their place values a bit more extensively than the fifth graders. Nevertheless it was quite the juggling act and I had a lot of things to consider to ensure that the lesson flowed the way I wanted it to.