Ready Time

Today was a scramble to get ready. It's always a scramble, though. I can't remember a single last-weekday-before-school-starts that wasn't. I didn't get nearly as much done this week as I though I would, but I did have a lot of opportunities to help other teachers practice their first day lessons. I even practiced my first day lesson!

This shouldn't be that unusual, but it is for me. Last year, I was teaching the same curriculum for the third consecutive year. I had made some tweaks and many improvements, but about 80% of lessons I had done at least once, and some as many as three times, in previous years. This year, I am teaching a new curriculum, and what's more, I'm sharing planning duties. While this is great for my workload, and for my learning to work well with others, it means that I am teaching lessons that I didn't write, so I need to invest more time into preparing and practicing. So, I practiced today. It felt good, and I was proud do get it done in the morning, so it didn't get lost in the Friday afternoon scramble.

We've had some changes in the operations staff at school (over the last two years), which have caused some...hiccups...over the last two years, and in the last two weeks. This caused a little extra chaos this afternoon, but I pulled out my handy Microsoft Office skills (let's hear it for divider label templates!) and sped up the process a little bit. At the time we were kicked out of school to go to our pre-school-year happy hour, my room was all ready to go. The room is tidy, worksheets are photocopied, and student binders and materials are laid out and ready to go.

I'm (somewhat) rehearsed.

I've heard great things about this new group of students.

All I have between now and then is a weekend. And I get to spend the weekend with me. My husband is out of town, so I can drink some port, watch cartoons, and run/bike to my heart's content. Last weekend's workouts were cut a little short, but I have high hopes for tomorrow's 20 mile bike/15 minute run and Sunday's 9 mile run. Three days until the start of year 5!