School starts a week from tomorrow.  Holy moly.

I won’t lie and say that I’m super excited about school starting.  I could use another two to three weeks to get used to the idea.  It’s extra hard for me because my family lives in Michigan and they don’t go back until after Labor Day.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter because school starts in one week and I have so much to do before then.  Eek!

I have five main goals for the year, which I wrote about earlier this summer.  Over the past few days I’ve been delving into the many resources that I didn’t read this summer and getting excited about some of the changes I plan to make.  The first being the inclusion of WAY MORE mentor texts.  Like, waaaay more.

I purchased this amazingly wonderful book-Writing with Mentors— and every page is inspiring.  Seriously.  I’ve already planned the first couple days to include mentor texts.  I purchased another book based on their recommendation for a first day activity.  The book is called Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers: Portraits of Fifty Famous Folks and All Their Weird Stuff and it’s full of sketches of the person along with what they liked, where they were from, etc.  Like one of the authors, I plan to use this at the beginning of school for students to do their own Author Sketches.  You can read more about it on their blog, Moving Writers, here.  The following week I plan to start using Notebook Time, which also comes from their blog and can be read about here.

In addition to adding these awesome ideas, I plan to continue to #starbucks my room (which I’ll share more about it when I have progress to show), and I’m not switching my digital class over to Canvas (rather than using Classroom and a Sites).

Whew. It’s going to be a crazy year of changes, but I’m excited about them.  Of course at this time of year I get super anxious.  How will my kids be? What will they need from me? How can I help them?

Hopefully I can keep up with blogging way more this school year.  I’m going to map out a plan for bi-weekly posts for the first 9 weeks to try to keep myself on track.  Here’s hoping!

Happy school year everyone!