Movin' on Up!

Here we go again!  Time to move classrooms.  This will be my 8th room but it's the first time I have had two handy helpers tagging along for fun. My little Jillian is in the drivers seat pictured above, wiggling her little way through the packed hallways like she's boss.  I will say that moving down the hall is much, much easier than moving to a whole new building.  In fact it went so smoothly and so quickly that I was done with most of the hard work before I remembered to take any pictures for before and after shots.  This is my room about two weeks ago...

    
When I move classrooms the very first thing I do is arrange student desks the way I want them to be, that way I can see how everything will fit.  I have always been a HUGE fan of the U-Shape.  I find that it cuts down on behavior problems, it helps with traffic flow in the classroom, it makes it much easier for me to spot the day dreamers and trouble makers and it helps build team morale because we are all facing each other at an equal level.  I am excited to know that we have a small group coming our way this year.  We expect 16-18 kids per class.  YAY!

My classroom library looks pretty good already, don't you think?  The thing is that these are all still organized for K-1 and I should probably change the labels to match the blue and green scheme.  The chapter books haven't been organized at all, simply taken out of a box and distributed in the blue and green bins (which came from the dollar store last summer).  I plan on using these book labels from The Sweet Life of Third Grade:

 

This is just a sample, she has 44 labels to choose from! You can get them for FREE by visiting her Classroom Library Show Off Linky Party. I also have to go through and label them for Accelerated Reader, this is the part I dread the most.  I anticipate it taking an entire day of work.  Do you have any tips for making these tasks go faster?  How do you organize your chapter books?

These two got a little sleepy on me and insisted on taking a nap timeout to roll around on the floor and giggle for 20 minutes!