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.