My Prize

This is the centerpiece I won at yesterday's opening breakfast/meeting. Can you tell I'm still excited about it? Hahaha! I love all the different kinds of flowers in the mug.

(When I saw the round, glass thing on the left in this shot, I thought it looked like an ashtray, BUT IT'S NOT! It's actually a coaster. I almost always have a bottle of water there, but had just finished it before I took this picture. The picture of Joe and Alex is at least 5 years old, but it's the most recent professional photo I have of them together! So until there's a new one, that's the one I'll keep out on my desk!)

I share a room with another reading intervention teacher and I took a couple of pictures after we got all of our stuff out and organized today. Our principal arranged our schedules so that for the first 45 minutes of the day, we are EACH going to have seven children at the same time in this room (for a grand total of 14!) and we are both going to be teaching the same identical thing! We both have a round table and the room is divided by three bookshelves that are a little over 3 feet high.

Can we say distracting??

And we have to fit all seven kids and the teacher around this round table. How in the world are they going to be able to have space to put their books up there? What about room when they are writing?? My complaint has already been lodged with the "powers that be" but so far the only suggestion has been to put in another round table. That way it will almost look like an "8" and there won't be any extra space on each side of the room at all. I mentioned getting a rectangular table, but I asked for a guarantee that I will get the round table back when we need it. What I really want is a kidney table or a trapezoid table, but there aren't any extra ones around the district.

(Yes, we have a flag in our room, but I also have this little one. You can see my watch on my desk. I always take it off when I get to work, for some reason. My pink cell phone is next to my watch. I keep it in an old credit card holder so it won't get all scratched up. Our building wide theme is "Oceans", so that's why the fish border is around the bulletin board. We use this bulletin board for US, not the kids. This is where we put a big calendar, special events papers, duty schedule, etc. That's why it's empty right now.)

Tonight was Open House. Three out of the five school board members showed up at not only our school, but all seven schools in the district, along with the superintendent. These particular people always make it a point to show up at everything and those of us who work there really appreciate that.