New classroom. New projects. New trips.

I finally feel like I have familiarized myself enough to create homemade things for my classroom. Now that the Chinese New Year is coming up with two weeks off, I am proactively hopeful of the things I will be able to accomplish. One huge project in itself is the complete move of my classroom to an entirely different room down the hall. There are some exciting renovations going on at our school, yet with every new adjustment comes a load of overwhelming stress (and minor panic). A few posts ago you saw my classroom coming together from the beginning of the year. Well, now it is almost February and I will be gutting that classroom and starting it all over again this coming Friday, yet in another classroom! So yes, that means not only taking my room/decorations down, but also lugging everything down the hall (desks, shelf, the whole bit). Luckily I will have the two week break to go in and fix things back up again. My students are going to be so messed up for the first week back...they are going to go to the wrong classroom!

While many teachers are stressing out about the big move, I have actually been pretty pumped about it. It is almost like a fresh start for me, since the first couple months of teaching I quickly realized what I wanted to change yet I did not have the time to rearrange my room. Now I am forced to have that time! What a blessing :) Some of my new ideas won't happen until next year (since one of them is replacing the desks with trapezoid tables), but my creative juices have been flowing.

One of my new projects are "Reading Phones" or "Whisper Phones" for my kids to use when reading independently. My students read very loud when they are reading to themselves, but hopefully this will improve the volume of the classroom during silent reading time. They were so easy to make and so inexpensive!

My next project is going to be making "chair bags" for each student to put their reading books, writing folders, and papers. Hopefully this will help them to stay organized. I must say I had a fun time at the fabric market trying to buy 10 meters of denim! They all looked at me like I was crazy...I loved it.

And my last and final project is to start crocheting a blanket for our living room. The only thing is that at the rate I am going, I won't be done until the summer and then we wouldn't want to use it then. Maybe I'm just planning ahead for next winter......yeah, that's it ;)

Aside from my little projects that keep me busy and motivated, both Dave and I are doing really well. We were bummed today when we forgot to bring our cameras on our biking outing. We biked about two miles down the river - except when we say down the river, we mean to say ON the river....it was completely frozen! Hopefully this weekend we will take the overnight train and head up to Harbin to see the ice sculptures (we hear it is beautiful). Don't worry, pictures will definitely be posted after that trip ;)

Love you all, thanks for those who read.......