The Weekend Before School Starts

Happy Saturday! I am having a difficult time wrapping my head around the fact that school starts this coming week. Monday-Wednesday will be meetings with the entire school staff, and Thursday will be a half day of school followed by a barbeque lunch for the school community, and professional development on our new math curriculum.

I spent four hours yesterday working on decluttering my classroom and then three hours in a meeting for new teachers and their mentors. Then I had an appointment and went to a concert with my husband. It was a busy day. Although there are still several things to do, I could certainly begin teaching without anymore classroom prep if I had to. But I'm glad I don't have to.

Date night before back to school.

Today I finished stapling together my newly created classroom procedure booklet, and am continuing work on cleaning up the small compost buckets that are used for compostable snack waste in each homeroom classroom. This is a new program that my students implemented after attending outdoor environmental education at YMCA Camp Seymour last fall. Getting last year's decorations and teacher labels off of the buckets for a refresh by this year's fifth graders has proven to be a daunting task. I actually started working on removing grime and permanent marker from the buckets on Thursday, and was successful at cleaning about five buckets with rubbing alcohol followed by nail polish remover. But I was working outside because I didn't want those smells in my house, and it was over 90 degrees outside, which caused me to pack it in for the day before using the nail polish remover on most of the buckets.

The smaller stack of buckets was
completed with these products.

In one stack, they are thicker than a
Harry Potter book!

I came back to the buckets today, a much cooler day, only to discover that the final pass with nail polish remover was not working on the remaining buckets. I don't know if it was the heat from the sun after the rubbing alcohol application or the time delay between the rubbing alcohol and the nail polish remover application or both, but I could NOT get the permanent marker to fade even a little bit today. So I did a little research online, and went around my house collecting the suggested products. I had all of the products on hand, and tried each in turn. Product after product made no visible difference, not even the Magic Eraser! I was getting frustrated to the point that my husband suggested just buying new buckets. But even at five dollars each, getting a new set of 20 each year would be prohibitively expensive, as well as run counter to the ideals of the snack composting program and the ideals of a Level Three Green School, a distinction earned by my school this past spring.

The products attempted for the second set of buckets.

Finally, I opened a tube of toothpaste with baking soda already in the manufacturer's mix, and grabbed a toothbrush we keep in the kitchen for scrubbing stubborn small spots. Viola! The permanent marker started disappearing, and with a nice minty scent rather than a caustic chemical odor. I still have about five buckets to scrub, and my forearms and wrists are very sore from the whole endeavor, but I am happy to have found a solution, and a cleaning process that I can hand off to the students in the spring. I was leery of handing them rubbing alcohol or nail polish remover, but I will have no problem handing out toothpaste and toothbrushes for them to use on the buckets.

I'll do my best to take tomorrow off before the official kick off to the school year begins on Monday. I did schedule a massage for myself, but I can't promise not to find "just one more thing" (or two or three...) to do. Right now, I'm off to scrub the remaining buckets, put names on nametags, and email parents a welcome back message.