My Classroom

Ok, for my first official post, I thought I would give you a tour of my classroom.  I love bright colors, polka dots, and chevron so you'll see a mixture of all of those in my room.  I also LOVE a clean classroom (I'm a little bit of a ok a BIG perfectionist).



Here is a picture from the corner of my room on the first day of school. 

This is my room from the doorway.

Here is my word wall, a work in progress since I decided to buy new word wall word cards this year, which is quite a chore when it comes to cutting and laminating everything.  I use the table as one of my stations during my centers rotations.

I started running out of places to put all of the cute stuff I found on pinterest, so I had to be resourceful and start using the furniture in my classroom as bulleting board space.  Here is a picture of our boggle board.  The file below the board is where I keep the copies for students to write on.  They are allowed to come to the boggle board when they finish thier work early.

This is a picture of our focus wall, and reading corner.  We sit on the rug over here quite often.  Our classroom library is in the corner along with many reading related posters.  This was from the first day of school so the focus wall is empty, but below you'll see some pictures of it after we have started our thematic units.

Here is our reading group table.  During centers this is where the kids come to for guided reading groups.



This is a picture of our ARopoly board.  I adapted this from the homeworkopoly board I found floating around pinterest.  At first I tried to use it as it was intended for homeworkopoly, but found it to be unfair to those kids who have no support at home when it comes to school.  I didn't think it was fair for them to never get a turn, while the kids who have parents that help them always get a turn.  I really liked this bulletin board so I decided to adapt the idea to go with Accelerated Reader.  I give them a turn on our ARopoly board everytime they take and pass an AR quiz.  It is a great way to motivate them to take AR quizzes without me having to hound them. 

Here is my activboard or Promethean.  I just got it last year, and I LOVE it!  I love using technology in the classroom since it is such a huge part of our world nowadays.   I think teaching kids how to use if from the early years in thier schooling is the best way to go since they will be expected to use it in the upper grades and especially once they enter the work force.  (**Note: Yes I see those ugly wires under my active board, and Yes the perfectionist in me hates them, but it was the only way to get the internet across the room to where my student computers are.  So for the sake of having student computers in my classroom I live with it :) )

Here is a picture of our back to school bulletin board after student work was added to it.  They wrote about what they did this summer as a first week of school writing sample.

Here is another picture of our focus wall and classroom library.  You can also see my super cute penant hanging in the window.  My really good frind made it for me and I love it.  It has bright colors, polka dots, and chevron all together.  It matches my room perfectly! :)

Here is a closer look at my focus wall in action.  These are our essential questions for our habitats unit.  Underneath the students rated themselves on how they felt about ansering those questions at the beginning of our unit.  Our rating posters aren't shown n the picture, but a 1 means they don't understand it yet, a 2 means they are starting to understand it but still need help, and I 3 means they can do it on thier own.  We usually will rerate ourselves midway through our unit and then again at the end of the unit.

This is our research center. On top of the bookshelf to the right there is a bin of library books all about our thematic unit. When students finish work early they are allowed to go grab a book and search for interesting facts. When they find one they go to our fact poster that is also hanging on our focus wall and add a fact for us to read. We usually review our focus wall several times a week and talk about what we are learning about, important vocabulary words, our essential questions, and any new facts that have been added to our chart.

Well I think that about covers it, at least for now.  Some of my pictures wouldn't load, and I could keep going and going if I wanted to tell you about every nook and cranny of my classroom, but I 'll save the rest for later posts.