I’m smack dab in the middle of my summer break with nary a thought toward school… at least as best as I can manage. Apparently turning off that teacher hoarder brain is hard even if you aren’t one of those dawn-to-dusk-all-summer teachers. I confess I slipped up this weekend and did make several purchases for the upcoming school year. The fabric store down the street is tragically going out of business, so I swiped up 200$ worth of fabric (for bulletin boards, I know nothing about sewing) for a measly $10. Pretty freaking cool. And yesterday, whilst browsing Zulily during Gospel Doctrine (I’m so going to hell) I purchased a giant pocket chart that effectively serves the purpose of one of those mailbox doohickeys.

http://www.zulily.com/p/organization-station-chart-set-181506-10269963.html

Only… it’s a pocket chart! A beautiful, slender, space-saving pocket chart with hopefully enough pockets to satisfy my overly large classroom.

It’s not like I am crazy about pocket charts. I love the idea of them but… a couple of years ago  I realized I had far too many of them and not enough cutesy things to stick in them. So away they went. But a couple remain, a couple tried and true and necessary pocket charts. I hope this one will join that order.

When I was on maternity leave this last year, an incredible teacher took over my classroom as substitute. She was a veteran teacher recently retired and did great, great things and had great, great ideas.

She also moved in like 10 extra pieces of furniture to my itty-bitty classroom that I had no idea what to do with.

The perk she had was one of those blue mailbox thingies… you know, the cardboard ones that fold up and are decently sturdy. It was nice and she even allowed me to borrow it the remainder of the year.

But… but it took up space! When you have 27 kids in a little classroom, space is precious. Add this to the fact I hate cutesy teacher stuff. This was stuck on a desk between two tables supposed to hold who knows what and, let’s be honest, the totally obsolete metal filing cabinet. Why do I have a filing cabinet in this digital age? Why?

I just don’t have a lot of odds and ends in my classroom. It’s still more crowded than I like, but my dream is to take this tiny classroom and make it more roomy, full of the essentials. Like a pocket mailbox chart I can hang discreetly on the wall.