My Classroom - Before

I was finally able to get into my classroom a couple of weeks ago - only to find it had been taken over by spiders....lots and lots of spiders. Just harmless, even helpful, ones. But still.....uuughh. So the first order of business was to haul in the shop vac and suck them all down. If you look in the second pic below you can see my lovely mother- and father-in-law doing just that. And seriously I think my father-in-law vacuumed for more than an hour before he made it all the way around the room and got most of the spiders. I'll just pretend that we intentionally left the rest to cover insect population control for the school year. Ah...the joys of teaching (and living) in Hawaii. (Spiders, cockroaches, and centipedes aren't usually something you deal with as a tourist - paradise does have it's draw backs.)

Let me tell you a little about my room before you see the pics. Last year I taught in a portable classroom - super common in Hawaii, especially since we don't have traditional hallways - buildings usually have 4-8 rooms connected, but the doors all open to the sidewalk outside - kind of like a hallway, but not enclosed. Hard to explain if you've never seen it. I'll try to remember to take a pic of the outside of the building tomorrow. Anyway - I was in a portable, which is pretty tiny, especially for kindergarten, but I did the best I could and endured the heat in the afternoons - I had 2 window AC units and they just did not cut it. I'm just glad I had AC at all.

This year I was able to move to a "real" room - more space and central AC. However, it's bittersweet since it used to be my best teacher friend's. I only got the room because she moved back to the mainland over the summer. It's been fun finding all sorts of little notes that she left for me. I just found one in the filing cabinet today that said "Mrs. Peterson is the best teacher ever." Made my morning.

So here are the pictures of my room, basically how it was when I first walked in this year. While I did get the keys on July 8th, it wasn't until last week that I actually did anything but bring all the stuff I took home for the summer back. (You know - all the stuff I was supposed to work on, but never seemed to get around to? Ya, that stuff.) Anything you see on the wall, including the bulletin boards, was left up by my friend.

From the front door - you can see my oldest (who was supposed to be helping) was NOT happy about the spider situation.

Looking from the back door

From the back corner. (Yep, she's still sitting on the chairs, feet up off the floor - you know, because the spiders can't crawl up and get her there!)
From the front corner
Straight on from the front- so you're seeing the back of the room. I LOVE that I have a sink and cabinets. I had neither of those things in the portable.
Straight on from the back - so you're looking at the front of the room. And yes, I'm aware that 4 is missing. It's actually on the white board ledge, you just can't see it from here.

Actually these pics look nice compared to how it is now:) It's gets worse before it gets better folks. Be prepared! I hope to get some during pics up tomorrow. I'm really excited at how it's coming along - especially my contact paper covered desks, inspired by Kristen over at Ladybug's Teacher Files. Seriously they make me smile every time I enter the room. And everyone who comes in can't believe how great they look.