Raining acorns

I have survived the first day!  I figured I should post something now, because if I don't do it right away, who knows when it will happen.  :)  I would consider today a success - no one cried, no one threw tomatoes at me, no one asked their parents to switch to another school.  That's a good thing, right?

Tomorrow, the entire middle school (40 students, plus six teachers) drive seven hours to Leelanau Outdoor Center (LOC), which is a week-long leadership camp put on by the Leelanau/Kohahna camp (which is for Christian Scientists during the summer, but they open it up to area schools during the year).  It's a great way for the students to bond, and I know by the end of the four days I will know them well, too!  So before I go, here are some pictures of the classroom.

It really is a beautiful room!  There are a lot of oak trees on campus, and one happens to be right outside my room.  Whenever there is a breeze, a hoard of acorns falls on the roof of the building, sounding like an intense - and quick - hail storm.  It adds a fun dynamic to the tree-house room!

I teach seventh and eighth grade.  Seventh grade has 15 students, and I have them for homeroom/advisory, language arts, social studies, and study skills.  Study skills happens to be on Monday (it's once a week), so today we were together from 8:50 to 11:20!  I will have to find ways to switch things up for them so it doesn't feel like an interminable time in my room.

Eighth grade has 14 students in it, and I have them for language arts and social studies.  The small class sizes are great!  What a luxury in today's school world, no?

This is my favorite area of the room - the sitting/reading area.  This room used to be split in two, so it's a large space now!  I like having the flexibility to be able to create different sections - even having the round table you see below for working with smaller groups or conferencing.  I brought some books from home and have created a lending library, which hopefully some students will take advantage of.  I also went to IKEA and picked up a few things - the green chair, the rug, and (my favorite) the frog cushion.  That was quite a hit with the students!

I have to share this picture with you.  Last weekend I was at a friend's house, and I saw the "chat noir" poster in a storage closet.  I had just been looking for some posters to make the classroom look more interesting, and I asked this friend - jokingly, of course - if she was using this poster.  She took me seriously, though, and gave it to me!  I have to admit, I can't complain.  I love the poster itself, and it fits Mango so well!  I couldn't resist trying to get her picture with it.  Posing animals is next to impossible, of course, but after a few tries to get her to walk across the poster (holding my free hand above it for her to play with), she sat in this position and I 

got the picture.  

Lastly, I put together a bulletin board outside the room to give the students a sense of what they will be studying this year in social studies.  It ended up being rather complicated, but the idea is that what you see is a combination of what the seventh and eighth graders will be learning this year in social studies (yellow cards), set in the context of transportation advances that were happening at the same time.  Here's an idea of what it looks like: 

And that's about it for now!  Now I get to change into comfortable clothes... and pack for a four-day camping trip with 40 middle-schoolers.