Friday, January 18, 2013

A New Beginning

This school year has brought on many unexpected, but exciting changes for me.  This is my twelfth year teaching.  Most of my years have been teaching fourth grade kiddos in an ESE classroom or in a gen. ed. classroom.  For all of those years I have longed to work with the itty-bitty cutie-pies down in kinder, but the opportunity never presented itself at the right time. A few years ago I was blessed with children of my own.  Watching them grow and my first kiddo beginning school, my desire to be in kindergarten grew even stronger.  I began this school year teaching fourth grade.  I set up my classroom, greeted my new students, and did my best to start the year off getting my students excited to learn and to be  BIG responsible fourth graders.  I had the sweetest class and extremely supportive parents.  The year was off to a great start.
And then...
On an afternoon in September before a 3 day weekend I was checking email one last time before I packed up my laptop and plan book to head home. To my surprise there was an email informing the staff that one of our kinder teachers had accepted another position.  "Did I read that right???" I wondered.  But, there it was...right before my eyes.  There was no time to think it through.  I quickly typed an email response to my principal requesting consideration for the kinder opening and closed my laptop up in a panic.... Did I really just do that???  By 9:00 the next morning I was offered the position and accepted.  The next two weeks were a whirlwind as I had to sadly inform my current fourth graders and their families of the change and pack up and move my twelve years of accumulated materials downstairs to my new room... all while still teaching and being a wife and a mommy too! 
So... now I begin the wonderful journey of working with my new kinder friends.  It has been a wonderful change, with many new unexpected experiences (There was a brief hair cutting issue on my first day!).  I am loving it and hope to spend many more years here!  Take a peek at a few pics of my room.  This is my first attempt at setting up a kinder room.  Let me know what you think!  I am a blog, tpt, and pinterest maniac so many of you might recognize items and arrangements in my room :-)

This is our classroom library area. 
This is my morning meeting area.
Here is our writing center! 
 
Many more pictures to come!