Ready, Set, Go!

Wow! It's hard to believe that it August already! Seems like forever since I've blogged, but with good reason- It's been an extremely busy summer here! I won't go into ALL the craziness, but one of the biggest was that I moved my 1st grade classroom to a new building in our district.  Talk about being amazed at how long it takes to pack and move everything, but even more eye opening was how much stuff I truly have and how many boxes I needed! Oh. My. Gosh! What was I thinking moving to a new building??

My classroom went 

from this....

to this! 

On a positive note, it provided me with opportunity to do a lot of purging! I can't even tell you how many trips I made out to the dumpster! Despite the mess of it all, it will be great to connect with new families in the small country school that I am switching to. I'm excited for the new adventures that the new year will bring.

Speaking of dumpsters, this was my backyard just a few weeks ago. Another of the crazy, unexpected things that took place this summer. Our roof sustained hail damage and needed to be completely replaced.

What. a. mess! 

So, here we are... just a few short weeks away from a new school year! There are still a few crazy things on my plate and I can't get into my new building until August 11th, so I've been busy with some Personalized Summer PD! I attended EdCamp Global (#ECG2016) and participated in several fantastic sessions! I've also been participating in various webinars- everything from great uses of Seesaw to using BookCreator in multiple content areas to Google tips and tricks. My mind is swimming with all sorts of new information and I'm continuing to mull over how I can best take this information and apply it into my curriculum. I am a firm believer that tech should not be used for the sake of using tech, but rather to enhance and transform learning!

I also played around with and learned how to use a couple of new sites this summer. Buncee was the first site I played with. On Buncee you can create, present, and share multimedia presentations. I used it to recreate my ABC's of first grade for my new school. I'm thrilled with the way it turned out and am excited for parents to be able to easily access this through my classroom blog, The Dog Blog

I also started playing with Adobe Spark. What a fantastic site to use to create beautiful social graphics! I can see this being a wonderful way to create visually appealing slides for some of my presentations. I really love the way this one in particular turned out!!

So with 3-1/2 weeks left of summer break and knowing that part of that time will be spent setting up my classroom, I can honestly say that with the exception of #10 below (I'm not a coffee drinker) I have enjoyed each and every one of these 12 things this summer! #7 is always near and dear to my heart and I so appreciate having the extra time to dig further into things that during the school year get put on the back burner. 

I hope you enjoyed your summer break as well! Did you get to enjoy most of these as well?

 Here's looking forward to a great new year!

Quick side note: 

#EpicPals will be starting again in the coming weeks. I am currently working on getting the September boards ready to go.