Kinsella's Kit and Kaboodle : Getting ready

Here in New Jersey, we don't begin school until after Labor Day. I know some schools have already started, but we don't have our first official day (for teachers) until next Tuesday, the 2nd. The students begin on the 4th and have just Thursday and Friday that week. Sometimes I'm not sure how I like such a short week for them to come back, because I feel like all the routines and things that were taught those two days get lost over the weekend. However, it is nice to have two days with them and then have a weekend to recover from trying to get back in the swing of things! I'm crossing my fingers that my class this year is a bit easier than my class last year. Last year was FULL of learning lessons and I'm hoping to take a lot of what I learned into this year and all the years to come. I will talk about some of those lessons in another post =)

Below are just some ideas of what I've been working on for my room. Yes, I do have a personal laminator that I use at home. I wasn't all that keen on buying it at first but I am SO, SO glad that I did. I don't use it all that much during the school year but I use it a lot during the summer time. It comes in handy to have things laminated right away and I do like the fact that the lamination is thicker than what we have at school. Tonight I was laminating a WELCOME sign (hence the large E that you see!) and labels for my math bins. I changed where I house all my math manipulatives and thought I'd get new labels for them, too. In the past, I just had the label on the shelf where they were supposed to go back, but this year I decided to label the bin AND the shelf. We'll see if it works any better. I will take some pictures tomorrow of my classroom and share them on here. Maybe you can get some ideas =)