Back to School Classroom Prep!

We are on the eighth day of school right now and things have been busy! Due to the late Labor Day this year, we started school almost a full week later than last year. This means our last day of school this year is later than normal, and that’s not taking snow days into consideration, but it’s too early to think about the last day or snow days already!

I spent one full day getting my classroom ready the week before our teacher PD days. I had gone into school a few times before that to get all my classroom materials to use at my AP Calculus Bootcamp, bring it all back again and store it in my cabinets, and then drop off all my new classroom purchases since they were taking over my bedroom desk. Other than that, though, I was able to get everything pretty much all set on my single full day here. This left me time on our PD day to make copies, get my gradebook and attendance books ready, get my online classrooms settled, finishing hanging new whiteboards, and taking care of all the other countless little tasks teachers do before students arrive.

This year I upgraded a few of my teacher materials. I had been using the same ratty black tote bag for years, and it was so old that tiny pieces of the fake leather were flaking off all over my house and classroom. The bag also didn’t have any internal pockets or compartments for pens, pencils, white outs, and cables, so everything was just jumbled up with my binder and planner. It was a mess. I bought THIS bag on Amazon, and I love it! It’s sturdy, the perfect size, and has several inner and outer pockets to keep everything organized, clean, and easy to find.

I also FINALLY replaced my teacher binder…I had been using the binder below for FOURTEEN years and it sure looked like it! I had a hard time getting rid of it for sentimental reasons, but it was just feeling dirty and gross. I got a similar one at Target and added more colorful plastic paper pockets and organized a bunch of the little student notes, mementos, prom invitations, event programs, and more that I had stored inside of it. This binder goes back and forth from home to school with me every single day and holds my page protected curriculum for the current week and next week. I cycle out the handouts/worksheets every couple of weeks and store the old materials back in my big binders at home. I know some teachers organize all their curriculum (worksheets, tests, quizzes, card sorts, handouts, etc) digitally on Google Drive or Dropbox, organized in folders, but I have never fully gotten on board with that electronic method. I started teaching before our school used the Google Suite of tools, so I’ve always had all my curriculum printed out and organized in page protectors in many, many binders.

I also got THIS new lunch box because I sadly lost my old CollegeBoard lunch tote at a math meet last year at another school. I always need a pretty big lunch box because I bring two different lunches each day to last me all the way to the end of extra help time after school.

When I first got to my classroom to begin cleaning and setting it up, it looked like this:

The custodians always take out all the furniture each summer to do a deep clean of the floors which get very stained over the year, especially with pencil lead that has dropped onto the floor and smeared. The floors looked great, but that meant rearranging every desk and chair and putting them back into groups in numerical order.

I got Command Strips to fix wall decorations and posters that had fallen over the summer. I got more extra strong velcro strips to hang my new VNPS whiteboards, which I am replacing after four years of heavy use. I replaced seven of my 2’x4’ VNPS that I had hung on the doors, cabinets, and walls. They were stained and scratched from all the use over the years. In the photo below, the whiteboard on the left was one of the old ones, and the one on the right had just been replaced.

I will say that taking down the old whiteboards, putting white Duck Tape around the edges of each VNPS, and hanging the news ones took many hours spread over a a few days, but this will hopefully last me for the next several years. Taping the edges with Duck Tape is critical for protecting hands from getting scratched on the sometimes sharp corners and keeping the walls cleaner when students erase their writing.

My teacher desk needed a major cleaning and refresh. I didn’t even know half the stuff that was in my drawers because so many things were shoved into them. Here are my top, middle, and bottom drawers now - they could probably be optimized even more with better containers, but this is still a huge improvement for me!

I fixed up my storage cabinet a bit as well and restocked with new markers, paper velcro, and Clorox wipes.

Another subtle thing I did that is already making a big difference is optimizing how I store the playing cards for each class when I send them to the VNPS. I blogged about this idea HERE over the summer, and I’m so happy I followed through and got this done. It’s so much quicker and more efficient to hand out cards now, and I’ve been consistent with collecting the cards within a few minutes of students going to their whiteboard spot. THIS is a link to the two magnetic whiteboard marker holders that I am now using as well.

Over the summer I also blogged about improving how I track attendance and grades on paper. As a school, we have been submitting attendance digitally each period for several years now, but I still like to have this on paper for easy reference and to now help with the weekly Friday Attendance Initiative that I wrote about HERE. My first prize drawing is this week!

I decided to make a digital blank seating chart and a tracker for VNPS classwork. I use the VNPS tracker to mark down which student went to which whiteboard station and how far each pairs/small group got in their thin-slicing work. Previously, I was hastily drawing out a diagram of my room every single time, so this should make the process much simpler for me!

Below you can see how I used to make my seating charts - not efficient because I would redraw the room layout each time and it looked messy. Now I can just print out more copies every quarter when I change seats.

Using out Student Information System, Infinite Campus, I created my own gradebook for this year - no more buying paper gradebooks off of Amazon! For each of my five classes, I printed out four blank spreadsheets with their names on it, one for each quarter (although for AP Calculus, I think I will need more than one sheet per quarter - we’ll see how it goes). Then I hole-punched them and used THESE colorful, plastic binder rings to create a mini booklet. Then for each class, I printed out the entire year’s worth of attendance sheets - each month has its own sheet and the dates labeled at the top, and the weekend and holiday dates are already shaded out. It’s already been a huge improvement to how I did it previously! I hole-punched these and created a second attendance booklet. At the front of this booklet, I put my five seating charts to help learn student names when taking attendance while students are doing the warm-up.

At some point during the day, I made all the copies for the first week of school - lots of graphic organizer sheets and guidelines for students to tape into their notebooks and refer back to throughout the year.

Most of the graphing calculators in my class set had their numbers smeared off - I thought the Sharpie would stay, but they get wiped off over time with student use. I renumbered them all and organized them back in their show rack. On the AP Calculus teacher Facebook group, someone posted a link to a huge sale (50% off!) on Amazon for the new TI-84 EVO graphing calculator. I blogged about this new release HERE in the Spring, and I ended up buying one for my son who is in Algebra II this year.

It feels good to have the classroom all clean, organized, and restocked for a new school year and a new group of students. Here are some photos of the classroom when it was CLOSE to being done - the new VNPS were still not fully replaced yet at this point.

26-27 School Year - HERE WE GO!