Transitions

I'm preparing to transition to third grade and getting kind of excited about it.

One of my favorite kiddos has a younger sibling in second grade, so I'll get to work with his awesome family for a second year in a row! (Not that teachers have favorites...but I'm allowed to have favorite parents!)

The classroom I'm moving into probably won't be ready on time.  That teacher is leaving to another school due to personal reasons, and I don't want to further anger this teacher by trying to move in while he is moving out.  It's better to just move everything home (it's not that far of a drive) and move back in August for a clean start.

I've started boxing up materials and separating what will stay in my garage, what gets given away, and what is set aside for third grade.  I'm even labeling the boxes for ease of moving.  Since B is on campus helping coach girls' soccer, he's on campus anyway.  On Mondays, he helps me move home boxes.  I told my students that I'm moving down to third grade and that the classroom books will be the last thing to go so they can enjoy them as long as possible.  Once it was established that the books are off limits until June, they were totally fine with me boxing up the classroom.  Granted, I'm not doing this while they're actually in the room.  There are just piles of boxes slowly being piled up along the sides of the classroom.

In the mean time, I'm also going through materials and seeing what can be scaffolded down to meet third grade needs.  I'm using my "bonus bucks" from Scholastic to stock up on second and third grade classics.  I've got a {donorschoose} project for third grade materials.  Today, between naps, I also drafted my third grade supply list:

We are supposed to supply some blurb that the school district supplies all the necessary materials and the listed supplies are just a suggestion, but we all know that's simply not true.  I get $123 from the state for class supplies, which won't even cover notebooks for my classroom.  Most teachers spend around $1,000 out of pocket on their classrooms each year.  Hopefully my parents will be generous and I won't have to cover too much out of pocket. I was able to stock up on dry erase markers on clearance last year and always try to snag deals at Target.

Fellow teacher friends, am I missing anything for third grade?