School Starts MONDAY!!

I would like to apologize for the lack of posting done by me this summer, but the 5 classes I took consumed most of my time (aka fun-sucker). Instead of reading a long post about my many emotions that I am having about my first day of school starting in 2 DAYS!! I would love to share pictures of the place that I will be spending most of my time for the rest of the year... My classroom! I would like to make a few shout-outs at this time. To my family: Thanks for all the help!! And to Laura Cameron, aka Best Person in the College of Education, I hope you enjoy finally getting to see pictures since I talked about it to you all summer and never put any up..

I cannot figure out how to make my pictures match with my caption so just follow the key as you look at the pictures:
#1 Welcome to my classroom!
#2 The Reading Barn
#3 Every barn needs a chicken
#4 The adorable curtains my grandmother made!
#5 The "Blooming Wall of Words"
#6 Little Farm Road
#7 Cubbies and a wall to show off their work
#8 The Apple Tree

These are all I have for now, but there are more to come soon! And when I say soon I mean within the month of August..

The Beginning

Background Check: For those of you who do not know I will be teaching First Grade at Autauga Academy (my Alma Mater). Along with teaching, I am working on my Master's in Elementary Education and helping coach the Junior High and Varsity basketball teams. So along with fun teaching stories you can look forward to reading about how much I want to be done with school, and amusing basketball tales. For example, one of my players sprayed my pepper spray in the gym, which then lead to her getting sick and the rest of us running out of the gym because our throats were burning so badly. She said she thought it was my lighter…. Trust me I'm not a smoker, but who knows after this first year of teaching, hahaha.

Back to the classroom:
It is important that you know I will be doing a barnyard theme in my classroom called, "Miss Hardin's Hoedown". In preparing my first classroom I want to be able to make it cute and keep it cheap because we all know teaches are not the wealthiest people in the world. To keep things cheap I went to Wal-Mart and looked in the clearance section of the paint to find the best deal. My Mom spotted a gallon of red paint for $3, and it was the perfect red! We also found about a pint of brown paint, that was only $5. Side note: I say about a pint because it was in a gallon paint can, but was less than halfway full. Do not worry parents I know my units of measure. We then found out a gallon of Wal-Mart brand paint is cheaper than the clearance paint we found, and bought a gallon of white paint for $13. $21 for paint is what I like to call a bargain.

After making our purchases at Wal-Mart we finally headed to MY CLASSROOM! And in staying true to the theme the first step in making this vision of "Miss Hardin's Hoedown" become real life we painted the loft to look like a barn. I have some great before and after pictures that will be up as soon as I find the cord to get the pictures from the camera to the computer…

The next goal is to create a game board to use as an incentive to teach positive classroom behavior….