Classroom Reveal 2015 - 2016

I LOVE looking at classroom pictures! There are so many great ideas out there it is hard to figure out which ones will work best for your teaching style and group of students. My classroom is still a work in progress, and to be perfectly honest it probably always will be. So stick with me through all of these pictures in my classroom reveal!

P.S. I took these pictures after the first day of school. I literally did not have an extra second to take pictures of my room, and I snapped a few quick pics before I left on the first day of school.

View looking directly in from the door

View standing in the doorway looking left.

Word Wall and cabinets.  

 Just don't look in the cabinets.. It's a little scary in there.

I got rid of my teacher desk, so I have a small computer desk and use my horseshoe table as my work area. 

After the first day of school the messiest desk in the room is mine, ha! The first day couldn't have been that bad then, right?

Desk area

 It's not the most "pinworthy" picture, but it is realistic. I'm all about keeping it real!

SMARTBoard area

We are required to have a color coded grammar wall in my school district, and the parts of speech need to be in a particular order. It's not the cutest thing in the world, but it is beneficial for the ELL students.

Wall of Fame and Super Improver Area

I am planning to have a "Wall of Fame" with pictures of my students and a speech bubble saying what they want to be when they grow up. I am hoping that I can use this to motivate them and encourage good behavior. I use color coded cards for students as "super improvers" where students move up to the next level after earning 5 hole punches on their super improver cards. I think that will be a separate post sometime this year!

Math Wall

Most of the blank space on this wall will be used for anchor charts.

Reading Fluency Wall and part of my Reading wall.

By the end of 2nd grade our students are expected to read 111 words a minute. It is a very high standard, but I believe it is achievable if teachers and parents work together as a team. I use this bulletin board to motivate students to become the best readers they can be!

The word work bulletin board holds our phonics (spelling) words and high frequency words that students are expected to read, write, and spell correctly.

Reading bulletin board

This is the rest of my reading bulletin board, and the blank space will be used to hold anchor charts. The crazy grey box holds our CHROMEBOOKS! I am so excited to have a chromebook cart in my room since I love love love to integrate technology!

Small Science bulletin board. The clothespins hold anchor charts or student work - really just whatever makes sense with what we are learning about in class.

This bulletin board will hold picture of students breaking rules to discourage them from doing it again.

I AM TOTALLY KIDDING! 

It will hold words that are "rule breakers" and don't follow any spelling pattern. I am hoping it'll be an ongoing list that we can add to and reference throughout the year. My goal is that by making a big deal about adding a "rule breaker" to the cart the students will remember to 1. check the chart for words and 2. remember how to spell it. It's my first year doing something like this, so I hope that it'll come in handy!

Library and Writing Wall

Cubbies and Student Work Wall

Social Studies Bulletin Board and Theme Books

My goal is to check out books that are related to what we are learning about in Science or Social Studies that students can pick up to read here. I have a lot of capable readers in my room, and I want to make sure that they are challenged and engaged in learning!

Well, that's my classroom for this year! It is still a work in progress, and every year I change a little bit more. It's like improving your teaching craft - you keep what works and change what doesn't. 

What is your favorite part of your classroom? (Mine is my library since it has taken 3 years to organize!) 

Year 2

My second year of teaching I taught 2nd grade, and wow do they start out little! At the beginning of the year they are basically just really big first graders, and by the end of the year the growth they make is huge. Couldn't we say the same thing about us as teachers? At the beginning of the year we start out thinking we are going to do things a certain way, but when the needs of the students differ from what we picture we need to adjust. Anyways.. back to the topic - my second year teaching!

All summer I scoured pinterest trying to find as many resources to use with my second graders. I searched for ideas that would help me organize and set up my classroom. I was moving rooms, and setting up that room was my summer job! Don't you wish we got paid for all the work we do over the summer? Ha! I inherited a room jam packed with tons of clutter and junk resources accumulated from years and years of hoarding teaching. I am so thankful for the resources I got from the room, but man was organizing that room a challenge! Here's what it looked like when I took over:

Yes, that is an overhead projector sitting in front of one part of the library. That library had over 1,500 books in it, and they were not sorted in any system AT ALL.

Yes, there is a desk facing the back of the room.

What is going on with the cubbies? Yeah, I don't know either.

Yes, there is a table filled with extra junk in front of the desk, which is already covered in junk. It also has another storage container underneath it filled with junk.

What is going on with those boxes next to the sink?

    

Yes, those are four copy boxes filled with old files stacked on top of each other. 

I couldn't believe how many things were packed into this room! I would open the cabinets and things would fall out on top of me. I moved half of the things out into the hallway and the room was still completely packed. This is what it looked like at the end of the summer:

Calendar Area

Reading bulletin board and turn in trays.

Door leading into my classroom.

Student work wall

Word wall & books hiding the storage on top of my cabinets.

DIBELS chart. I had the student numbers written on stars and moved them up as their reading fluency improved.

Birthday Wall

View from the back of my classroom

Data area. I put this up at the last minute and wasn't completely motivated to get it done.

Math wall and meeting area. 

That year was amazing and challenging for many reasons. I had an amazing group of students and parents. I had 31 students. THIRTY-ONE! With 31 students you have to really get creative.. with seating arrangements, behavior management, filing papers, time management.. you name it! I had a wonderful group of parents that were a huge help with preparing materials and assisting us with our special events we do throughout the year.

Here's what I took away from my 2nd year of teaching - Things change.. a lot. Your teaching style will have to change to meet the needs of your students, and when you have 31 littles in a room it will have to change again. There are some things you just can't do with 31 students. It's easier than your first year of teaching, but you still learn just as much as you did your first year. It'll get easier (hopefully!) every year!

What are some things you learned from your 2nd year teaching? 

The First Day of School

The most important day of the school year is almost here! I will miss sleeping in and having free time, but I am SO excited to get going with my new kiddos. These past few weeks I find myself thinking, ''I've had a month off.. Will I remember how to teach?" I sure hope so! :)

The first days of school are so important with setting up your classroom and can make or break the rest of your school year. Just like in the book "The First Days of School" by Harry Wong, we practice practice practice our procedures like crazy!

I do not become too attached to my plans because I know they will change slightly once my students start being pulled for testing. Here are my tentative plans for the first days of school:

If you'd like to download a copy of my first day of school plans, click here to open in Google Drive.

A quick note about classroom procedures:

When they perform the procedure correctly I have several cheers that I teach them to praise and reinforce appropriate behavior. I use these during the year after students share work, present, or for someone who needs a little bit of extra encouragement during the year.

Some of these procedures will get taught as they come up in the morning. I mean, we do breakfast in the classroom and I'm not waiting 3 hours later to teach them how to throw the trash away, and I'm definitely not going to do it myself. If something comes up earlier then we will address it then, but otherwise I use this block of time to go and teach all of my procedures.

Are you ready for the first day of school? 

Math Tip Monday - Back to School Math Ideas

Today I'm linking up with K's Classroom Kreations and Theresa's Teaching Tidbits for Math Tip Monday. This post is all about Back to School Math Ideas!

These past few years I've found so many great ideas from blogs, and I really had to rack my brain to find something to write about for this post. I even started to wonder.. I found so many great ideas, how can I even compete with what is already out there? 

Well..

After a quick visit to my classroom I found a few ideas that have really helped me out these past few years, and I hope that you'll find them useful, too! 

1. Math workbooks

We do not have consumable math books. Why, I have no idea. It was a huge struggle trying to manage all the copying and storage of what seemed like a random assortment of worksheets. Because.. it WAS a random assortment of worksheets. I felt like I was constantly passing out papers and the students were constantly shoving them in their desks, losing them, turning them into paper airplanes, crumbling them up, cutting them into pieces, and basically anything expect what they were supposed to be doing with them! It drove me insane! #teachersunderstand

Well, I wasn't going to do that again my 2nd year with this curriculum. Once I was more familiar with it I would copy all of the papers I would need from the unit at once and copy them into a workbook. I was able to pick and choose which worksheets I would need, which would be journal activities, which could be done as a center, etc. It worked out SO much better. 

My curriculum will sometimes bounce around from topic to topic, so the main focus may be counting, but there are other topics within that topic that are sometimes not related. We pull those out and put them into a separate workbook. So there might be a counting workbook, a money workbook, and a time workbook that the students are working on. It is easier for me to keep the skills separated so that my lessons are more focused.

Side note - I realized that I needed to create separate workbooks AFTER this first one. Needless to say I will be revising this workbook this week!

These workbooks are just packets with a double staple on the side. They stayed at school in their math folders, and homework was sent home separately. I had very few students lose the workbooks since it was much harder to lose a workbook instead of just one piece of paper. I think they would have lost a "packet" but not a "workbook" because it sounds more official!




2. Center Bags

Oh, centers. It took me the longest time to figure out how to manage this. I needed a system that would work for me and I kept trying out different things, and finally last year I found something that worked for me.

The prep of centers is the hardest part for me. Once I get busy with the hustle and bustle of the school year I have the hardest time constantly gathering supplies and organizing centers. Eventually I realized that most of the centers I have use similar materials and I was constantly emptying out the materials from one bag and dumping them into another. I needed to work smarter and not harder and from that idea came center bags!

The center bag is a supply bag that I had in my classroom, and I put all of the materials that are constantly used in math centers in them. The students know they probably won't need all of the materials in the center bag, but it's there just in case they do. I have also heard of other teachers who have the students keep one set of the center or math materials in a box in their desks so they can pull them out quickly when needed. I try to keep the amount of things in my students' desks to a minimum, so that doesn't work for me, but it's just a different spin on a center bag. The picture below is a peek into what I have in my center bags. 

Included in the bags are:

1. 2 different color wet erase markers

2. Tens frames

3, Bag of money

4. 2 Dice

5. Unifix cubes

6. Base ten blocks

7. (Not pictured) Bag of number cards - I think I must have put the number cards in the bag with the center materials so I will need to put a bag of number cards back in the center bag.. just in case. 

When we were working on centers my students would go and pick up a center bag for the materials they needed. There was a designated spot for all the center bags by my math centers where I stored the bags. 

I use a lot of centers that come with my math curriculum, and the center bags are aligned to those games. I have some other centers and activities that might require something from a center bag, so if a student needed anything they would just go and pick up a center bag. They never had to ask me about it and I never had to find the materials for them. It keeps your prep to a minimum since you only have to prepare them at the beginning of the year.  I just wish I had that figured out my first year!! 

3. Math Focus Wall/Word Wall

I love my math focus wall, but I hate these pictures! It is missing a few things that I will add this week so please bear with me while I describe how I have it set up. 

The whole focus wall

Here is a photo of the whole focus wall. You probably noticed that there are a lot of blank spots, and that is where I put the anchor charts that we create as a class. I create new ones each year with my students so that it is more meaningful to them, but I happened to find two laying around in my room. I put them up so you can get an idea of what it looks like when the anchor charts are up. I will put up one or two more next to the money anchor charts at the top and possibly another one below the money anchor chart on the right. The space below the hundred chart is where I put up a poster that tracks the mastery of math facts, but I haven't got one yet. 

The hundred chart is a tool that we use frequently in math so I want it in a spot where the students can clearly see it, and have easy access to it if need be. I have the days of the week to the right of the hundred chart, and the calendar to the right of that. Below the calendar you'll notice I have a light blue pocket chart, which matches the background near perfectly! #ilovethetargetdollarspot

I used push pins to mount a small white board to the math wall, which has multiple uses. We use it to solve equations for the coin counter, write a message, work out other problems, etc. It saves me time from running back and forth between the math wall and the main white board. I had smaller plastic holders attached to the wall to display coins in the coin counter, but those kept falling off the wall and wasting precious minutes of math time so I realized I needed to change it this year. I used zip top quart bags, and I had my students set them up at the end of the year. Overall they did a good job, but I am going to move the last one on the bottom to the main row. It just doesn't look right to me. At least it'll be a simple fix!

Side note - Those clothes pins will be used to hold anchor charts in other areas of the math wall, but I didn't get a chance to move them yet. This isn't related to math, but it will make your life SO much easier.. hot glue a push pin to the back of a clothes pin to hang up your anchor charts. It is to easy to put them up and take them down!! 

Here's a better picture of the calendar area. Below the calendar I have two pocket charts, which I am going to use as a math word wall. We write a lot in math to explain our thinking or strategy, journal entries, questions, etc. and the students need help spelling math words. It will also hold vocabulary words that we might not have on an anchor chart that they still need to remember. 

I am SO excited about this new addition to my math focus wall for two reasons: 

1. I will no longer have to spell  (or help them sound out) the word equation for my students multiple times a day. They can simply look at the math word wall and find it instead!

2. I got these pocket charts from the Target dollar spot. YAY! 

These are examples of a student created anchor charts. I made both of these anchor charts within the first month of school last year, and I think they held up pretty good! 

I make all of my anchor charts with my students. I might prefill in some information to save time during instruction, but the majority of the chart is constructed with student input. I have an idea of what I want the chart to look like and the information I want in it so I pick and choose their responses and reword as necessary. My anchor charts aren't always super cute and "pinworthy" but they are functional. Sometimes if I get lucky they'll be cute AND functional!

Make sure you check out the other blog posts for Math Tip Monday! I know I'll be taking notes of the other fabulous ideas out there!

I'm Having a Sale!

I'm stopping by for a quick post to let you all know that I'm having a sale! My TpT shop will be on sale from tomorrow (August 3rd) until August 6th. I'm keeping my store on sale a few extra days. Stop by and grab one of my products for 20% off! 

Click the button to visit my shop!