Classroom Tour

Well, I'm not done, but I at least left today with a room full of clean tables that look presentable.  I'm still waiting for my TV to be remounted in my new room, and after that is done I can hang the framed posters I made. I'm also still looking for the cursive alphabet chart that went missing over the summer, and lockers and cubbies still need to be labeled, and... well, the list never really ends, does it?  But, I snapped a few overall pictures of the room before I left today.

 Supply shelves, reading area, and possibly the wall where the TV will be mounted.  The bird nests look really tiny hanging up there in these pictures. Maybe once the rest of the wall stuff goes up, it won't look so odd.

 Looking towards the back table where I will work with students.  Love those curtains and windows, but dislike the black blinds underneath.  They will stay hidden as much as possible!

 Just going around the room... my desk is in the back corner.

Computer and extra work tables, cubby "island", and my little storage cube that I *love*, but that flag needs to be moved to another location. I keep running into it when I stand at the cube and do any work there.

The front of the room... the crates managed to last the year last year, though the fabric looks a little worn.  Hoping I can get another year out of them.  And I like my little pennant... adds just enough of a splash of color.

And, just to compare... this was what the room looked when I first started setting up... black blinds, no bulletin board on the far wall.

Everyday Math - Pretests

One of the goals I have for this year is to take more of a math workshop style approach to math so that I can differentiate more effectively.  That means that I need to pretest students at the beginning of each unit, and since I couldn't find any pretests, I decided to just make them myself.  I decided to include one question from each lesson in the unit, plus additional ‘Practice’ problems, covering items that the students should be able to do independently. I rated each question as easy (one star), medium (two stars) or hard (3 stars) so that I can see which questions they are missing and hopefully group them more appropriately.  So far I have units 1 and 2 done, but the goal is to complete the set by the end of the year!  If you are interested in using them, they are in my TpT (Ch. 1, Ch. 2) and TN stores (Ch. 1, Ch. 2).

DIY Projects

Moving to a new grade level for the second year in a row, I didn't quite know where to start again this summer.  I brought home curriculum and textbooks, downloaded all of the common core standards, started looking at what went wrong last year that needed to be improved... but most importantly, since I will have some of the same kids that I had last year, I needed a new classroom theme!  And that meant that the cute DIY projects took precedence over everything else for a while!

My room was repainted, and while the color is lighter than it was before, it's still quite yellow.  Pair that with wooden cubbies, wood trim, a wooden desk, wood doors... it was a little overwhelming and needed some contrast and color!  I am a huge fan of the white shelves and cart that I painted last year, with all of my clear and white bins, so that helped.  I decided to get rid of the lime green bulletin boards and trade it for turquoise, and then I found the cute, white, Boho Birds borders to tie it all together.

After a few trips to the craft stores, I had tulle, scrapbooking paper, a cute wooden bird cutout (on clearance for a dollar), a few small wood birds, small wood rectangles, small clothespins, glitter glue, glue dots, and probably a few other things.

The large bird is decoration for the classroom door, the medium birds will be locker tags, and the small birds and white rectangles will be the dismissal board.

Tulle and scrapbook paper turned into cute little nested birds to number the tables.

Leftover scrapbook paper turned into a pennant to hang above the white board and all the little critters my kids have given me over the years (two sided means it's even pretty in from the hallway!)

Here is the bird on the door with my homemade "curtains" (scrapbook cardstock punched into circles and sewn together on the sewing machine), and my jobs board with the glittered clothespins to hold the name cards.  The 5 jobs at the top will be revealed a few weeks into school, and students will need to apply for those 'Specialists' jobs.

Now that everything is hung up, I guess I better dig back into the planning!

Classroom Library Reorganization

Moving to a new grade level, yet again, and inheriting books from the outgoing 4th grade teacher gave me another chance at getting my classroom library organized in a more meaningful way.  I got it about half way there last year, but even with the system I was using, I found that kids kept reading the same series of books over, and over, and over... So, I wanted to organize more by genre this year.

I once again had high hopes for some of the book cataloging apps, and pulled up the Classroom Organizer app that I tried using last year, but still found it too frustrating with the lack of titles in the database.  It was also too cumbersome to label each book with level and genre after I scanned it in.  Even for the books that I put in manually, it was inconsistent when it came to checking them out to students.  So, that app has since been deleted.  If only Amazon and Scholastic would get together to create an amazing app to catalog books (already including their levels and genres) and check them out... Ahhhh, one can only dream.  Anyway, back to the classroom library.

Looking up every single title in the Scholastic Book Wizard can be quite tedious.  My mom made the silly mistake of saying "If there is anything I can do to help you with your classroom, let me know." She probably thought she was off the hook living hundreds of miles away, but you can probably guess what request came next!  I took pictures of stacks of books and sent them off in emails, and magically emails came back giving me the levels and genres of all of the books.  After that, I just had to match emails to the piles of books, then put a genre sticker on each book and write the level on the back.  This project NEVER would have gotten finished if I didn't have help! (Thanks, mom!)

I'm pleased with the way everything is set up now.  One shelf is baskets of books sorted by genre, one shelf is popular authors and series, and the last shelf is sort of the "Land of Misfit Toys."  There are also a few baskets of non-fiction picture books and informational books.  When I created the labels, I changed to rectangles instead of circles, since they didn't seem to stay on so well last year.  I also created dividers for the books that are not in baskets, in the hopes that giving everything it's designated place will encourage students to put books back where they belong.  We will see how long those dividers last, but hopefully this will encourage kids to try reading new books and authors.

Peanut Free/Nut Free Posters

As I was walking down the hallway at school yesterday, I noticed that everyone has their peanut free posters hanging up, and it's the same posters, year after year.  So, I put together some new peanut free signs, and this time added actual peanut pictures to them instead of just making them classroom themed.  I also made table labels, and a list of peanut free snacks to send home to parents.  You can get a copy through my TpT store or my Teachers Notebook store.

Phonics Cards - Vowels and Digraphs

A second-grade teacher at my school found a set of phonics cards that she thought would be great to hang on the wall behind the table where she pulls small groups, but the cards were only sold in the UK.  She scoured TpT for something similar and found nothing, so she told me about it, knowing that I'm always looking for new stuff to create. So, after days of searching for graphics that would fit each vowel and digraph, it's finally complete! And, now that TpT is allowing you to correlate your items to the Common Core standards, it's aligned with standards in K-2.  So, if you would like to check it out, you can visit my TpT store.
 

8/20/13 - Edit to add photos of the cards all laminated and hung on the wall!