Some games, some stress, and a whole lot of work!

I've been MIA from the blog for a week because I was enjoying my last few days of freedom, and then yesterday all I wanted to do was come home and sleep! So tired!

Some Games
Back to school week for the teachers is always so boring and I was worried about this... We've had ALOT of turnover during the last 3 years and moral has been LOW.  So one day while watching Game Show Network (no idea how I ended up there), I started watching Minute to Win It and got a genius idea--> DO THIS DURING TEACHER WEEK!  What could be more fun??  Cheer on your team, get your blood pumping, have a great time!  And, I can't lie, its been working like a charm! Everyone is loving it! :-) Unfortunately I have no pics to share- maybe soon.

Some Stress
There are 8 kindergarten classes at my school.  My schedule has always been different on Fridays- my special class is later than everyone else's.  Well, they moved it to Mondays this year- MONDAYS! UGH!  I can handle it on Friday, last day of the week, the kids don't even care. But I don't want to start my week that way!  This is on top of not having a para (Thanks to a coworker for sharing her's for half the day!!!!), getting a new ELL teacher to work with (even though I worked great with a different one!), and finding out that our ELL times have changed and my new special schedule conflicts with this...   So, today was a little stressful and everything is subject to change, of course.  

A Whole Lot of Work
My room was a disaster as I started setting everything back up! Disaster I say!!  But, it's coming along and will be all ready by end of day on Friday.  Here are some prelim pics:

I set up my main calendar/teaching area for the beginning of the year.  Color, shape, 100's chart Posters, the months of the year (which will come down after about 10 days so we can count how many days of school), calendar, voice level chart (weather stuff will go under this), alphabet chart (we use Breakthrough to Literacy), and the sentence strips are dry erase strips for my daily objectives. 

If you go behind my calendar wall this is what you find!!! STORAGE!  I absolutely LOVE it! It's also where we hang coats/backpacks.  I spent some time going through and reorganizing- almost everything you see was there when I moved in, which is pretty amazing.

Lastly, I set up this little gem.  These are from Marsha Mcguire of A Differentiated Kindergarten.  They are a set of ball dolch words, which you can find here!!  The system is absolutely amazing and engaging for the students!  So many different activities to help them learn sight words while having fun.  My kids last year LOVED them and really cheered each other on when someone passed a level!  I decided to hang them out on Command Hooks to make them easier to get to quickly.  The rest of the sets will be around the corner of the shelf- I ran out of space!

Hope school is going well for you whether you are still setting up or the kiddos are there!