DIY: Desk to Coffee Bar

So when Andrew moved into his old duplex, the previous owners left him this lovely piece of furniture. They used it as an island in their kitchen. 

When we moved into our duplex together, we simply had too many kitchen appliances (thanks to our many generous friends who got us cool things for our wedding!). We have a pretty good sized kitchen for a duplex, but we couldn't fit everything on our counters and still have space to cook. I remembered that this desk was sitting at Andrew's old place and was most likely headed to the dump. It sat in our house in it's original glory for about 2 months and then I decided that it needed to be painted.

I did some research on the internet and I found that chalk paint is really awesome to paint old furniture with. It doesn't require sanding or priming (unless you only want to use one coat of your chalk paint) and it looks good!

I found some recipes to make your own chalk paint, but I knew that I only needed a little so I bought some already made from The Home Depot. I used some old brushes that I already had and bought a plastic tarp for $2.

Chalk Paint   I got the 8 oz jar of Serene for $8.50 and used about half of the jar.

Creme Wax I got the 8 oz jar for $12 and only used about 1/4 of the jar.

The finish on the top had been sanded off at some point and I noticed that when I started painting with the chalk paint that the brown was showing through. I could have done two coats, but I'm cheap and remembered that the tenants before us left two bottles of cream spray paint. So Andrew helped be carry it outside and I used a bottle of spray paint to prime the desk.

 It was pretty warm out that day so this dried in 15 minutes and we carried it back inside to be painted.

It is hard to tell in our awful lighting that we have in the house, but it came out a nice light blue :)

 It only took about 15 minutes for the paint to be dry enough to put the wax on. Honestly, by the time I was done painting, the first side I painted was dry. This stuff dries quick and doesn't smell very strong AT ALL! I did all of the painting in my dining room.

The waxing was fairly easy. I used a microfiber towel and just rubbed it all over the desk.

 Here is the almost, final product! The knobs that were on the desk were just awful (I'm sad I didn't take a picture of them) so I ordered some glass knobs from Amazon and two days later we have this...

... a place to hold our Keurig, bread maker, and bread box! The drawers come in handy to store all of our coffee, soda mixes for our Soda Stream, and candy! 

Not bad for $20 and about an hour and a half of time :)

Classroom Pictures

So I never took pictures of what my classroom looked like at the end of the year (I should have because it changed a lot throughout the year!), but here are some pictures of what my classroom kind of looked like at the beginning of the year.

 My desk area. I actually ended up moving it a couple of times but for the majority of the year it was in this vicinity.

This bulletin board became my "star" board. When my students made an 80 or higher on a test, I would put their names on a star and put it on this board. They really liked it and would compete to get the most stars.

This is a actually a magnetic graph board. It came in handy when we were doing slopes!

My Algebra Wall. I don't remember where I bought the posters but they came from a teacher supply store in a pack. I referenced them many times throughout the year. This wall eventually also became a word wall of sorts.

My second white board and projector screen. I really loved my window- it allowed for us to turn the lights off while we were doing stuff on the projector. As you can see I started the years with tables, which I was so excited about. However, my students didn't quite get that you aren't supposed to talk to your friends, cheat off of them, or do silly things during class and the tables weren't really helping me out to stop that. I found it impossible to separate students who had conflict with each other. They would try to fit like 8 people around one table. I also think that it's best for students to have their own space. So I convinced a teacher to switch out his desks for my tables. The desks had their own issues (like being moved around the room) but they worked MUCH better than the tables. [On a side note: my husband was "helping" me move and decorate and found my giant tub of Tangrams and made this lovely design on one of my tables. He was so proud of it!]

I went with a very colorful theme this year. This bookshelf was my "supply" center. I had supply bins for every table with markers, pencils, scissors, and glue in them. I also had all sorts of colored paper, notebook paper, and graph paper for them to use. When I got my textbooks half way through the school year I added them to this bookshelf as well. Behind the pink curtains to the right is a door that leads to a mechanical closet. I covered it up so that they wouldn't be tempted to break into it.

Another picture of the Supply Shelf. The table by the door has the "turn in" trays, a bin for all work that we did for the week, and in the magazine racks are white boards for students to use. The calendar on the wall was kept up my a student in my 8th period and he would write what we did that day so that we had quick access to see what someone missed while being absent. I would also write upcoming test dates and holidays on there.

Two filing cabinets pushed back to back with a curtain over the sides. I had some inspirational quotes that I had laminated on it, but those got destroyed/stolen throughout the year. I also had to move all the stuff on top of the cabinets because my third period liked to mess with all my stuff.

I'm kind of mad at myself for not remembering to take pictures of my classroom before I took it all down in June. I moved to a new room which is even bigger than this one, has like 4 windows and is in the middle of the school so I won't be alone like I was this last year. Our building is closed for some renovations until the beginning of August so I can't start setting up until then :( 

What A Year!

What a year this has been!

I was inspired by some of my friends to start a blog about my teaching adventures. So, I decided to actually keep up with this blog. We'll see how that goes.

So, I was the Algebra 1 EOC teacher at my school this year. At the beginning of the year I had about 80 students total in 7 periods. Two of my periods were for remediation so they only had 5 students each in them. Now before you get jealous, this meant that in some of my other classes I had 18 students. (Remember I teach at the school where many of our students are the class disrupters-talkers, non-workers, discipline problems) So having 18 of them all together for 45 minutes was a challenge. Many of my students had taken Algebra 1 at least once before, some twice. They have given up on school, have trouble with authority, and just flat out don't think education is important.

The first couple of months were rough with a principal change, many rule changes, and having three teaching positions unfilled (they were temporarily filled with IA's and long term subs). I think that most of us were just barely surviving day-to-day. We were treading water trying to keep our heads above. Most of my class time was not spent teaching math, but dealing with discipline and teaching them some pretty basic social skills. 

However, come January things were much, much better! After some rearranging of classes and other weird events my class sizes shrunk drastically. By the end of the semester my biggest class only had 7 students. I think because the classes were much smaller they got the 1-1 attention and help that many of them are craving. I had way fewer discipline problems and when I did they were to a slightly less degree than the fall. I actually had students tell me that math was fun and my class was their favorite (1 out of 8 is pretty impressive!!)

I was a little bummed out when the EOC test results came back because only 20% of my students passed it. BUT we sure did celebrate those students who passed! I had a couple of them that this was like their 6th time to take it and they finally passed! I made them certificates, gave them stars, and we celebrated. This was one of those moments that make all the terrible, awful days in the fall semester worth it! I made a big deal in all my class periods about my 20% who passed- maybe the few that were close will work hard for it next time. I also made a big deal about the students who passed my class. While some of them didn't pass the EOC, they earned the credit all by themselves and for some of them that was actually a challenge. Can you tell I LOVE when my students can find success?!?

Anywho, I hope to post soon about the coming school year and the challenges that will come with some of the changes we're having. Also, we moved classrooms again to be grouped with our departments instead of being randomly placed throughout the building so I've been working on some new classroom decorations and set-up ideas that I will share.