Summer Classroom Norm

Summertime for majority of schools across the country means repairs, replacements, and moving rooms.  Always true in our school.  Having just finished my 6th year at West Marshall, at least 3, possibly 4 summers my room gets to house the supplies of those rooms that are being repaired.

Waaaaayyyyyy back in January, Sunday, January 11 to be exact I received a phone call from my principle asking if we had a 2-wheeled cart we could bring down to the school.  When I asked her what she needed it for, she said the boiler lost all of its pressure and emptied itself into one of the classrooms.  They were evacuating all the supplies out of her classroom as we were talking.  I told her yes and we were on our way to help.  This Kindergarten teacher (you know who you are Mrs. Diser) has a lot of stuff.  With inches of water flooding her carpeted floor we were getting things out of her room as fast as we could haul it.  The fix that made the most sense was to take her to my classroom and I would use the band room as both band and music classroom.  The kids thought it was a great adventure and honestly I think Mrs. Diser liked the space in my room.  I made sure to moan and groan to make sure I got my space back.  After a week we all got moved back to where we belong.  

sidebar:  The reason I remember this so well, is obviously it was very out of the ordinary, but my student teacher had just started the week before on January 5.  The first week of her student teaching every day we either had a late start, early out or a snow day.  Then her second week we're adjusting to different room teaching.  She definitely got the best experience.

 So now that summer has arrived, that room that was flooded has warped floors.  It's time to repair.  Obviously that means empty everything out of her room once again and taking it to the music room (once again).  We had a little surprise on one of our in-service days.  We had had a meeting at the high school that morning.  When we came back to the elementary we found they had already started ripping out her floors and then insisted that the built-in cabinets be emptied out also as they were going to repair the floors under them.  That made for a mass panic of shoving things on carts and running them down the hallway to my room and just dumping stuff anywhere there was a space available.  Mrs. Diser, good luck when it comes to figuring out where all this stuff goes when you're allowed back in your room. 

I will say that she does have a lot of amazing "stuff" that now I know what she has hidden in those cabinets.  Tons and tons of manipulatives.  Hmmmmm.  How can I use them in a music center?

There are also some puppets that might not make it back to her room either.  Seriously, there's a whole family of them.  Do you realize how many different vocal explorations I could do with all of those different characters?