Keeping Up with The Joneses: Summertime, Here We Come!

Today is the first official day of summer for Katie Anne and me, and I am so happy about it! I don't think I've ever looked forward to a summer more than this one since I started teaching - working for the last few weeks while pregnant has not been easy! I will be very happy to have a more flexible schedule and more chances to take a break during the day, and the ability to nap during Katie Anne's nap times can't be beat, either!

We're not just going to be sitting around the house all summer, though. We're taking it easy today, and then we're starting lots of fun things to keep us busy and entertained during our break. Katie Anne's got swim lessons (we rescheduled them for later in the month after her arm injury this week), she's starting a weekly summer gymnastics class for three-year-olds, and she's going to a princess ballet dance camp in two weeks! Plus, we've got our usual fun of library classes and movies each Wednesday. This year, we've got season passes to the zoo, so we hope to visit the zoo several times with friends. Of course, we'll play outside a lot and do a lot of swimming, too!

Before I could officially start summer, I had a lot of work to do in my classroom. When I go back to school in August, I'll be teaching first grade again instead of kindergarten, and I am sooo excited about it. I'm going to be looping up with most of my kids (I'm dropping 3 and adding 5 new ones), and that will make my maternity leave and sub planning so much easier. I love my students, and I loved teaching first grade last year, so both of those things make me really happy! What was hard about this transition was that I had to pack up every little thing in the room because I'm moving across the hall. The school is being painted this summer, so our principal is taking this opportunity to rearrange a lot of the teams and move a lot of teachers around. I'm only moving across the hall, but it was still a ton of work to do - I can't believe how much school stuff I've accumulated in seven years! Here are some pictures I snapped before I left yesterday of my old room, all packed up and ready for the move! (The teacher who's taking my room has put some stuff on that back bookshelf, so that's not my stuff.)