Thursday Thirteen #4

Thirteen things I want to do during workdays next week:

1. Finish writing lesson plans. So far I've got plans up through the end of November, and I want to get at least enough done to hold us over till Christmas. (By the way, that means lesson plans for that particular subject - writing. It was kind of vague when I reread it.)

2. Do lesson plans for other subjects. Or at least long range plans, and a bunch of lesson plans. Usually it turns out that I might know that next week, we're doing Chapter 9 in math, but more likely than not, I don't have a clue what's in chapter 9. I want to be able to be more prepared. I think if I am, I'll be less busy during the day, and I can spend more time with my kids than doing other things.

3. Plan our Reader's Workshop. Here's the thing. I don't have money to go buy a bunch of books on this topic, which I would love to do, so if you have any links to good Reader's Workhop websites, or just any insight at all, that would be awesome.

4. Plan our classroom economy. I'm going to make the kids pay rent for their desk and chair, and if they don't pay rent, they have to sit off to the side at a table that day. That's going to be hilarious. I thought about making them stand up all day if they didn't pay their chair rent, or making them lean on their laps to write if they didn't pay desk rent, but I thought that would be a little mean. Funny, but mean.

5. Plan our morning meetings. Again, this is something I'd love to read up on, but can't buy books for right now. Any ideas or suggestions?

6. Visit other teachers. Almost every teacher in our school has had to change classrooms, and I think it's so interesting to see how they make the rooms different than the previous teacher. I'm going to waste a lot of time this way, I know.

7. Rearrange the desks. I had to move all of the furniture out of the way before I left summer school, so I have to put it all back. I can never come up with a good room arrangement, since my room is like, some kind of weird triangle.

8. Find somewhere to put my alphabet. I've had one of the alphabet strips that goes across the chalkboard for two years and haven't put it up yet, because it doesn't quite fit on one board, but it's not long enough to cover two. I'll probably end up not using it again.

9. I downloaded some genre posters from the Internet that I'm going to laminate and tape up to my cabinets, which are a horrible orangy-pinky-salmony color. Hopefully the kids will learn something AND it will cover up that horrible horrible color.

10. Laminate the nametags (why did I never think of this before??) and tape them down, along the little cursive alphabet stickers that go on the desks.

11. Velcro some pencil cups to the desks, and make sure I have enough sharpened pencils.

12. Set up a mini-classroom store (which will probably [in]conveniently be located in a cabinet, since I have nowhere else for it, and since I don't trust the kids not to steal from it).

13. Take lots of pictures of my room!

Question: How do you feel about cursive handwriting? I'm thinking about making it required for some assignments, because my kids REALLY need to work on it. But I just don't know. That might be more trouble than it's worth. Any input?