Five For Friday - Newbie Post!

Here is my first shot at participating a Five For Friday, or really any linky party for that matter! I have been a teacher blog reader for years and I finally feel like I might have something to contribute now that I'm starting my fifth year of teaching! Whoo-Hoo!

 In my district, you have to pack up your whole classroom at then end of every year and whatever doesn't fit in the two teacher cabinets in your classroom has to be stored at home for the summer. My first two years of teaching I had the classroom of my dreams with 4 walls, a door, the key to the building so that I could work in my classroom during the summer..... aahhhhhh..... I am envious of you all who have these things. While Cy-Fair is quite unique it is a great place to work and I've quite acclimated to the open-concept classrooms. I have yet to have any of my teaching neighbors complain about how loud my classroom is. I'm also changing grade levels and campuses this year so a major clean-out of my teaching items was needed. Here is what I have so far.....

Thankfully, we have an empty room in our house that becomes my teacher storage area during the summer because in Houston you don't leave anything that could be rained on or melt in the garage!

 Mardel's 20% off sale during the summer is one of my most favorite days. Last year I practically bought the place out, but that means that this year I was able to be a little more economical (and the hubs put me on a budget for classroom purchases during the summer....bummer). You can see what my classroom looked like last year here. I decided to keep all the black, add in some brighter colors, and get rid of the maroon because another classroom already claimed Texas A&M for their No Excuses University classroom at my new campus. :(

I'm going to try and let students create some of the classroom decorations so that it will feel like "theirs".

 Can we just celebrate that I have officially blogged more in the past week than in the past year?!?! Hallelujah! Let's just see if I can keep this up when my master's program and school starts back up.... Speaking of master's programs, I decided to not only take 2 four week long master's classes, BUT teach summer school too! #crazy
Obviously I survived, not only that but I received A's in both classes and they were not easy!!! WHOOP!

 I spent the last couple days updating my district website to be more than a contact information. One of the things that I have absolutely fallen in love with, and I have found I'm not the only one, is Symbaloo! I created a Symbaloo "page" for each of our math topics and am working on adding websites so that students have a central location for all the websites I want them to visit. I'm not quite sure how to follow other people or share my "pages" just yet, but I'd be more than happy to share what I have!

In just a few short days, my hubby and I will be camping, hiking and jeeping in Colorado! We keep joking that we might just not ever return to Houston from our trip!

That's Mt. Sneffels, a 14er that we are supposed to climb! I'll let you know how that goes!

Thanks for visiting and I hope that you'll be back! Let's link it up!