School's out

Another school year is over. School officially finished on Friday afternoon at 2.30pm. We had a good day, and the children went home with a bag of goodies, including a new book to read and a memory page, plus a bouncy ball and a sticky stretchy creature, a few lollies, and whatever they chose to buy with their "tickets". We also enjoyed ice-cream and movies. The day before they helped me start packing up my classroom by pulling most of the posters off the walls, and I sent home all their workbooks and notebooks. Alas, I still had work to do! First I have to finish the documentation to handover to their grade 5 teachers. I also had to finish designing our new Elementary Library, and prepare detailed documentation of the new furniture we will need so it can be made while we are away for the summer break. The other massive job was to pack up my classroom, sort out what I would leave for the new teacher and what would go with me to my new office, pack everything that had to be moved, and organise for the move to happen.

I just realised that some of you reading this might be wondering why I am moving out of my classroom and into an office. After ten and a half years of teaching, I'll be exploring a new role next year as Elementary Coordinator (Primary - Grades 2 to 5). I'll be working closely with the other Elementary Coordinator who will be responsible for our Early Years programs (Nursery to Grade 1). Together we will be trying to replace the Elementary Principal who has just left. Some of my key responsibilities will be reviewing curriculum and supporting staff as they implement the curriculum. I'll also be work on our WASC self-study for our next Accreditation visit, which is due in 2019.

Back to today. I finally finished packing everything at about 5pm yesterday, having run out of boxes on several occasions! This morning, four young men were waiting for me to arrive to carry out the move. First they moved a number of items out of the office, then they moved all my stuff into the office. While they were working on that, I went and did an interview with a prospective new student. When I finished that, I returned to my old classroom to discover it was almost completely moved (only a couple of things left which they possibly didn't know needed to be moved). I went downstairs (my new office is on the third floor). I was very satisfied with their work. Here's what my office looked like at 11.30am today!

I plugged away throughout the day, and managed to sort the boxes the contain my classroom library from the rest and put them to one side to deal with in July, when I come back from Australia. I then managed to unpack most of the rest of the boxes. I hit a glitch when I couldn't find the shelf supports to go inside my cupboard, which I knew I'd put in a safe place. They were found eventually, and so I've got one cupboard sorted! The big bookshelf needs some work, but I did manage to sort a lot of stuff as I unpacked it, so that's not too bad. In fact, there are quite a lot of things that still need homes, but the photo below shows just what I did achieve. Tomorrow I'm planning to do a few other jobs, then Friday I'll tackle the office again and see if I can get it to a point where I can be productive with a few other jobs that need to be finished.