Think ... I've been working on the Railroad. I'm not sure why that was in my mind with that tune but now I can't seem to get it out of my head. I've been Working on My Classroom all the live long day. I've been working on my classroom just to pass the time away.
Can I just say I'm loving my classroom this year? Both the group of kids I'll be having and the way I'm setting up and designing my classroom.
Here's a little tour ...
This is what you see when you first enter the room. It's where we're keeping everything important like the turn in tray, pencils, and hand sanitizer. On the bottom shelf I'm keeping the kids portfolios. I keep important assessments like the IRI and other pieces of evidence that show students have mastered standards.
Around the corner is our class library. These are mostly my fiction books. It looks like I may have squished this picture a little much but you get the idea. We call this area of our room the pond. It is one of two meeting areas this year in our classroom. I have gone to less table spots than students in order to both open up the room and provide for several different areas in which students can work. This will work in my classroom because I have short whole group lessons and then break out into independent workstations during both literacy and math. During that time I meet with smaller groups of students for more diferentiated instruction.
The next picture will show my nonfiction section of my classroom library. This section is just at the opposite side of the pond from these shelves.
There are actually two shelves here back to back. This shelf is my nonfiction library. The shelf to the back of it houses my chapter books. The small shelf on the side has all animal fiction stories. Aren't there a lot of those? I thought it would be easiest to separate them like this rather than place them in three or four baskets. I'm using the treasure box on top of the shelf this year for Bible time. I will be introducing Bible to the kids this year using the parable of the pearl of great price to share with the kids the treasure of scripture and of relationship with God. I'll then use it to spark curiosity of what the next lesson will be each week. This year I also installed small white boards on my closet doors. These are going to be used for my word wall. Instead of taping up index cards each week, I'll write up the words with dry erase. Much easier so I'll be much more likely to stay on top of it.
This is my writing area. I keep materials for my kids to use both on the white bookshelf to the left as well as in little cubbies on top of the trapezoid table. I'm using a small Fancy Nancy bulletin boardish thing I found on Pinterest on the side of the bookcase. You can link back to the original poster
here. My idea is to use Fancy Nancy words when I teach my students to revise their writing. We'll talk about which words are ones that we use too much when we're writing and I'll put those on library pockets on the Fancy Nancy board. We'll put words on popsicle sticks that are fancy words or synonyms for those words in the pockets. I will teach my students to highlight words that are used often and replace them with words from the fancy word pockets.
This is where I'll be meeting with my small groups. I know it's still a mess. I've got two more days to finish up. Hopefully I can make it. It's not in this picture but where the watering can is I now have a small closet shelf where I've put all of our clean up supplies. The job chart will go next to it on the end of the wall that sticks out there. You can see into the second side of my classroom where I have two "tables". One of them is a table and the other is two desks zip tied together and covered with shower board. I've actually covered the table with shower board now too. My kids last year destroyed the table top and I needed to cover it with something. I thought shower board might be a fun route and with my very small class this year (10 students) we could all fit around it if we wanted to write spelling words or do making word lessons or whatever else.
This is my math and computer area. On the white shelf is my math book library and math notebooks that we will be using for calendar time. I bought these from Cara Caroll at her
TpT store. Our math workstations will be in the drawers under the computer table. Behind the green curtain I have extra supplies stored for when we run out throughout the year.
Around the corner from math is area for listen to reading. This is located in our bog. Similar to the pond, the bog is another large group meeting area. There was no room on the walls near the class library in the pond for calendar materials so I used this space for that.
Here is a somewhat finished bog. The trees on the walls are sticker decals that can be easily taken off and reused. (At least that's what the package says.) Most everything on the calendar wall is standard. But the two cookie sheets will be used for data collection. Each day we will have a question and the kids will place a magnet with their name on it on one of the two pans to answer the question. I am adding a section to the Math Notebook I talked about earlier in which students can collect data. They will make tallies for this collecting and then graph the results and analyze the data.
I do not have pictures of my science area nor of a shot of the classroom from the opposite end. I would like to add those at some point. But this post is long enough for now.
I hope you enjoyed a peek at my classroom! :)
