Let The Freak Out Begin

This past week, I had a girlfriend in town from Southern California.  We worked hard and we played hard.  When we weren't playing tourist, we were crafting.  It was so fun for me to have another "girl" around to bounce ideas off of, and to keep me focused.  Amanda is leaving tonight (cue the tears and sappy goodbye music), so this week is going to be the start of the big push.  After all, we report back on the 16th, and my room still looks like this....

As you can see, the good news is that we didn't have to take the paper and fabric off of our bulletin boards for the summer, so I'm not totally starting over from scratch.  The other good news is that my classroom has BRAND NEW DESKS this year.  You read that correctly people...in this age of "no money for education", I was lucky enough to get BRAND NEW DESKS!  Holla!  I will have to take a pic of the old desks, so you can all see how desperate we were for new ones.  For some reason, my classroom was the only one that still had desks from circa 1965!  You have no idea how much room I gained, just by kicking those old, ratty desks to the curb.  They were way bigger (and uglier) than these beautiful new ones.

After Amanda and I had a little party-for-two, because of the desks, we moved on to the daunting task of cataloging my classroom library.  Last year there was no rhyme or reason to my library.  The kids used the heck out of it, but I didn't feel like everyone knew what books I actually had.  It was always just kind of pot-luck when they'd go to look for a book.  This year, my goal is to have a system.  The problem is, I don't know exactly what I want that system to be.  I have seen various ideas on the blogs, but none of them suit me 100%.  I'm sure mine needs to be a hybrid of some sort, but I still don't know what I want it to look like ultimately.  In an effort to procrastinate, yet still be productive, we tried cataloging the books using the Book Retriever App.  It works great in theory, but I can't figure out how to sort my titles.  If I can't sort the titles, then the program is worthless to me, as they are currently listed in the order I am scanning them.  Can you say "pointless"?  If any of you out there in bloggyland are familiar with the app and know something I don't, please feel free to chime in.  I'd be forever grateful.

On that note, I'm off to get some breakfast and then back to the grindstone.  I'll be posting a very fun Monday Made It tomorrow, so be sure to check back.  After all, my crafting would be for not if I didn't have anyone to share all the fun with.