Within a week of arriving back in Georgia I found a job. I feel very blessed and thankful that it happened so quickly and so easily. Who can afford to be picky with job offers in this economy? Not me so I took a leap of faith and I signed a contract without know what grade I'd be teaching (K-4). Well the grade couldn't be more perfect. I am teaching kindergarten at a brand new charter school in Dekalb County. Although it's a brand new school it is located in an old school building that was closed for two years prior to this year. To me brand new means lots of work and lots of hiccups. I'm glad I'm teaching kindergarten because I have resources, techniques, and a familiarity with kindergarten that will anchor me through the storms of working at such an unestablished school.
The school that I work for is run by Mosaica Education. Mosaica believe that new teachers need 3 week of training, so three weeks of painfully slow and stressful training I did. Training was held at one of our Mosaica sister schools. After two weeks of training I was finally able to see the school and a few days later I was able to finally see my classroom. On August 1st we got furniture but not necessarily all of it and not necessarily in the right rooms. We are in a very large building with a lot of classroom that will allow us to grow from K-4 to K-8 over the next 4 years. So furniture was delivered all over. So for Wednesday we began the quick and frantic process of begging, borrow, and stealing furniture, decor, supplies, etc to prepare our rooms. Orientation/ Open House was held on Thursday and Friday. You can only imagine how the school looked during the unpacking progress. I wish you could have seen how much card board was piled in the hallways.
By Monday, August 6th there was a pretty amazing transformation and we started school at 8am prepared or not. This is what the week looked like
- We have some but not all of our curriculum sitting in boxes waiting to be inventoried, delivered to classrooms, and unpacked. We did not get to use it the first day of school.
- The school has NO COPIER yet! We did a lot of art projects and I did a lot of communicating with parents via email.
- We did not have the proper licensing to serve food out of the lunch room nor do we have any lunchroom furniture. Cold lunch was made delivered to our classrooms.
- We had to specials the first week which quickly had to change because we had the children all day with no break for lunch, specials, or planning.
This is a summary of my first week of school.
"We started to unbox some
of our curriculum Thursday and Friday. Our copier should arrive next
week and specials should start next week. I was in survival and
entertainment mode. It was a little like babysitting 18 five year olds
for seven and a half hours five days straight."
My desk, my kidney table for reading groups, word wall, display of student work, etc.
The school is lucky to have such great built in storage. In the last two sections there are built in book bag hooks.
I relied heavily on my SMART board to survive and entertain during the first week of school. I've got a lot of things to learn about SMART boards.
When you work at a brand new school you get brand new stuff.
The school purchased these things for my classroom:
- 5 rectangular tables
- 1 kidney table
- 1 small rectangular table
- 1 dry erase/ felt board easel
- 1 huge oval ABC 123 rug
- 1 small rectangular ABC rug
- Mailboxes/Files/Cubbies for all the students
- A play kitchen set
- Bookshelves
- File cabinet
- Teacher's desk
- 3 pocket chart hangers
- SMART Board
- 1 Teacher laptop
- 8 Student computers & tables for them (they haven't arrived yet)
