a few projects..

So it's still three weeks until school starts, and I still have just about zero information about my school, my curriculum, or my classroom, but being the type-A planning-crazed person that I am, I've started a few projects to appease my need to plan everything.

Personally, I LOVE birthdays. I love my birthday, I love celebrating my friends' birthdays - your birthday is the one day of the year where you are, quite literally, the most important person in whatever room you enter. This year, my birthday happens to be the very first day of my very first year teaching. I'm getting a GIANT and AMAZING present for my 23rd birthday: a classroom full of students! HOORAY!

Anyway, I want to make my students' birthdays special. Besides celebrating in class during the day, they're also going to get to dip into the mysterious and very prettily wrapped Birthday Box. I saw this plain brown box at JoAnn's and got a liiittle too excited about it..

I wrapped it up and put a bow on top, and voila - a Birthday Box! Now all I need to do is raid the dollar store to get some goodies.

I'm pretty excited about my second project, too. I had an unexpected windfall on Friday when two of my pre-kindergarteners accidentally destroyed school property (while blatantly disregarding pretty much all of our classroom rules... Oh, how I'll miss corralling 4-year-olds every day) in the form of an old whiteboard mounted on an easel. Somehow they managed to rip the whiteboard off the easel, rendering them both pretty much useless. Or so you would think!

Knowing, however, that I need to outfit an entire classroom, I decided to salvage the whiteboard. It's not in too rough of shape - just a couple of tears from where it used to attach to the easel.

I hacksawed that sheet into four pieces and sanded down the edges so now I'll have at least four whiteboards for small group/center work! And it was FREE!

I still have a couple other projects I'm working on, but without knowing what kind of curriculum or school behavior plan I'm going to have to follow, I don't want to get too excited about anything too specific. Having my own classroom is exciting enough :)