First Day of School Complete!

And what a crazy day it was. Sorry for the lack of posting over the last few weeks. Needless to say I've been very busy getting things ready for today. Things still aren't 100% perfect at our new school but its getting there.
In my new job as department coordinator I find I've been making  a lot of lists of all the little things that we need to buy and I need to get done. There was a point last week were I was grateful I have a fashion studies room on the first floor. I was able to escape the craziness of the department and just get some work done in quiet. Things are rolling along though and I'm still excited about my new position as well as the new school.

It's surprising the little things that you notice in a new building that you take for granted in an established one. I noticed at first break that the school was a disaster. There was garbage everywhere and I was quite flabbergasted that our students could be so messy. I spoke to our assistant principal after school and she said she was feeling the same way. That is until she started picking up trash and then couldn't find anywhere to put it!! It would appear that we don't have nearly enough garbage cans. I was a bit relieved because it hopefully means our students aren't quite as messy as I might have thought.
Another strange thing that I'm not used to is my students having chairs and tables instead of desks. I'm going to have to be diligent the next few days and make sure that they push their chairs in when they leave (or put them on the tables if its last block). Needless to say this didn't really happen today.
Our building is also so much larger than our old school. We all knew this and expected that we wouldn't see much of each other any more, but I don't think I really believed it until today. I still see the science and math people and in all honesty I didn't see many english or social teachers before (we were before and still are on different floors), but I see a lot less of teachers in passing now.
The most frustrating part of my day was, as usual, the photocopiers. After school our printer network decided that we couldn't print from our computers. So if you hadn't already printed a paper copy of document you couldn't photocopy it. This meant I had to come home and print an assignment I forgot about for tomorrow and then go back to school after dinner to copy it. Fortunately I don't live too far away.
Of course there were many good things about today, I still can't believe how quickly it was over.

I was so happy to be teaching in my new science lab for a couple reasons. First, I have a window!! Having taught for nearly 6 years in a room with no windows that was a big deal. I also have enough space in my class that I can walk around between and behind tables. I like to move around while I teach, but my old room made that impossible.
Most importantly, and best of all, moving has given me the opportunity to redesign and restructure my classroom. I've added things like a word wall and each table has a "tool kit" with necessary items. (Not school supplies but other things I'll explain in a later post)
I'm planning to post some pictures of both my rooms in the coming weeks and explain exactly what I'm doing differently with my setup. For now I'm going to end here. It's only 9 pm, but as I'm sure many of you know, the first day is exhausting! (And lets not forget hard on the feet! I haven't worn heels in a few months!). I think I'm going to have a nice bath and an early night. I hope you all had a great first day as well and good luck with the rest of the week!

More on the Move

Well the ball is really rolling now. The staff is back at school officially next Thursday and our students follow on Sept. 4. With my new role as department coordinator I'll be at school every day from now until the first day of classes. The excitement is definetly growing, but so is the list of things to do.

I think its safe to say that we won't be completely unpacked come day one, but we expected that. I've gotten both of my classrooms as setup as I'm able to and now I'm just busy planning and organizing. There have been a few bumps in the road. Today I found out that my fashions studies room will not be outfitted with a projector. I guess the decision was made that I didn't need one...I'm not so sure about the logic behind that since I do have to present "notes" at the start of the semester. I'm also not sure if the additional machines and equipment were ordered for fashion studies. When we did the class sizes in June we planned for 24 students in fashion studies with the understanding that I would have four new machines in addition to the 20 I already have. It doesn't look like that happened so I'm hoping this will be rectified quickly so each of my students has a sewing machine.

It's also been interesting because our school was not built with air conditioning (this is a new government thing I guess). Our building has air circulation but do to construction in our drama theatre they haven't been able to turn it on upstairs because of a circuit overload (they are fixing this right now).So this means that right now our upstairs labs are swealtering (~27 degrees celcius). It's like working in a sauna (maybe it'll help me lose some weight lol). Hopefully its fixed soon so we're not dying on the first day of classes.

My time today was spent sending emails and talking to admin trying to figure out where items are and when other things are arriving.

Needless to say its been hectic but things are happening and we'll be ready to teach day one regardless of weather or not we're "ready".

My Teacher Binder

I promised you a post on my teacher binder and here it is.

This year I decided to treat myself and purchased three Martha Stewart binders from Staples. I'm a bit of a stationary nut and I love the line. The green one is my "teacher" binder, the brown is for coordinator stuff and the little one is for my yearbook stuff.

To start with I have six copies of semester calendars, one for each class I teach. I like to have a quick view of what's planned as I find it helps keep me on track. Of course each has a small tab with the class name on it. This means that it looks a little crazy but I find the tabs make it easier to quickly find the class I need. My semester calendars are right at the front of my binder and not behind any divider.

My first divider is for daily lesson plans (you can download the template I made here). Within that each class had its own section (again marked with a small tab). When I designed my lesson template I made sure to put in a section to list things I need to photocopy. In the past I've just kept notes on random sheets of paper, but as you can imagine its not organized and loose paper tends to disappear.

After that is Marks and then Attendance. Each has its own divider since I like to keep these separate, again for easy location and reference. The templates for both of these are the same for obvious reasons, but again each class is separated with a small tab.

Finally comes the less fun stuff, Emergency Procedures (I think that one's self explanatory), General Policies, Other (this is where I keep the other general information we get in our start of the year packet), and Notes (for taking notes at staff and parent meetings).I also have loose-leaf at the back of my binder along with a zippered pocket for keeping small things.

So that's my binder, I'm excited to see if the templates and layout work for me this year and I will more than likely modify it as time goes on. If you do anything differently with your teacher "binder", even if its not a binder, I would be interested to hear about it.

As promised the other templates I created are available for download below.

Calendar
Marks & Attendance

Moving to a New Building

Its been in the works since I started teaching with our school district, and in September our school will be moving to a new, state of the art, building. We are retaining the name so its a replacement school rather than a brand new school. I thought that it might be a good idea to share some of the ups and downs of the whole process.
For the longest time the "move" didn't really affect me because it was so far away and I wasn't involved in  the process. That all changed over the last 10 months.
To say that I'm a bit stressed and anxious for the fall would be an understatement. There's just so much left to do. We started packing our stuff  towards the end of May and we needed to be done at our old building before the end of the school year. For me this part wasn't so bad because I've only been there for 5.5 years so I hadn't had much time to accumulate stuff. (Although I did accumulate ;) ). The teachers who have been at our school longer clearly had a much larger job than I did.
The last two weeks of the school year, while students were writing exams, was open to unpacking at the new building. Unfortunately there is still a lot of construction going on at the new place so it meant that we couldn't get a whole lot done. To make matters worse I have two classrooms to unpack and setup, my lab, and my fashions room. Fortunately I managed to unpack 90% of my science lab so that's one thing off my plate. Unfortunately I could do nothing in the fashions room because the furniture won't be installed until sometime this month. Needless to say I will be at school early this year, probably mid-August, to get everything ready.
It's going to be crazy, but I am beyond excited to teach in this new facility. I think moving affords us so many opportunities to do great things.
I'll have more posts in the coming weeks to fill you in on the "fun"

Teacher Binder & A Freebie!

In the past I've used the teacher planner books that we get from Friesen's. They do a pretty good job and they contain everything that I need, day plan space, grades, calendar etc. My main problem with them is that they don't look very nice, and they aren't customized to our schedule. As a high school we are on an 4x80 min block, 2 day rotation schedule. The teacher planner has space for 8 classes. As a result it has too many classes and not enough space for each. In addition they aren't very nice looking, and I like things to look appealing if I'm using them everyday.

So before the end of the school year I decided that I was going to change things up for the fall. I purchased myself a nice green Martha Stewart binder from staples and I've decided I'm going to use that instead. My next challenge was to find a printable lesson planner template that would fit my needs. Now you may have noticed that there are lots of these types of things for junior high/elementary school teachers, but not so much for high school teachers. Needless to say I couldn't find something I was happy with so I decided to make my own. This offered me the opportunity to fully customize a template for my own needs and make it look nice at the same time. So I grabbed some free graphics from Vector Jungle and set to work in Corel Draw. I'm absolutely thrilled with the result. 

In addition for space to write the lesson for each day (I keep more detailed plans than this, but my lesson planner is more of a quick what's happening/to do list for each day). I also left myself some space for listing Handouts/Resources I need to have ready, giving this a dedicated space means its easy to locate. The class name section is probably a bit bigger than it needs to be, but I can also use it to write notes for assemblies and reminders of that sort. Finally, I included a small space for lesson reflections since I want to be more active in writing stuff down this year. I figure if it's right in front of me I'm more likely to include a reflection. 

With that I thought I would make the lesson planner available for you to download if you'd like to use it. I'm going to be creating a grade book template and probably some others in the very near future and I will likely make those available as well. Keep in mind this is only for personal use, and please let me know what you think! Once I have my entire binder put together I'll share some photos and info on that.

I may create some templates with different graphics in the future. In the meantime here's the link for the lesson plan template, Enjoy! 

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog. Over the last few months I've been thinking of starting one with regards to my teaching practice. I was selected as the coordinator for our science department for the 2012-2013 school year and I decided that this might be a good time to start blogging.

My intention for this blog is to enable me to reflect on teaching physics and general science as well as general pedagogy. I'm hoping to try out several new things this year so it should be interesting and I hope you'll embark on the journey with me.

Stay tuned for updates.