This summer I decided to "take the summer off" for the first time in my life and I learned something new and interesting about myself - I do not like being on vacation for that long. I enjoyed relaxing and sleeping in for about one week and then I felt restless and started planning as many things as I could to fill my days. I traveled to Florida, California, Washington and Ocean Pines and when I wasn't traveling I was subbing for summer school, babysitting, or shopping for a condo. SO the summer truly did fly by and now we're back in school and, call me crazy, but I am very happy to be back!
Since I am so excited to be back and I'm already loving my two new groups of kids, I thought I'd share with you how I decided to decorate the room this year and a few of the activities that we did to get to know each other during these first few days of school.
The Classroom
This
year we are implementing the Lucy Calkins Units of Study for writing
and one of the things that Lucy recommends is to set up a writing center
in the classroom. Since we have limited space, I decided to use on of
my bookshelves as my writing center and bought two thick, black poster
boards to create my own bulletin board. I created the writing process posters based on Lucy's Guide to the Common Core Writing Workshop. I've
got pencils, a sharpener, a stapler, a 3 hole punch, lots of loose leaf
paper, Dictionaries and Thesauruses, a basket full of sticky notes, and
another basket full of erasers.
Check out my Writing Process Posters & the free WRITE Pencil Banner!
On this board in the back of the room I will be sharing the agenda and reminders for each day. I kept a lot of space around this board clear so we can have meetings at the beginning of each class in order to discuss our plans/goals for the day. The Friends & Family board was inspired by Conscious Discipline, our new, school-wide discipline program. I'm having the kids bring in pictures to put up on the board as a way of getting to know each other better and to remind students of the school-family connection that we are working to foster.
I am so embarrassed by the mess in this picture, but I wanted you to see the spot that I have set up to work with small groups. The pictures on the cabinet doors are book covers that my students drew at the end of last school year.
Another mess! I promise it will not look like this for long. (Seriously, I am such a neat freak that at the end of the first week of school one of my boys asked if I had OCD). Here, on my other cabinets, I have my Text Features Posters that Primary Punch has in her store for free!
This summer I saw so many upper elementary teachers posting pictures of their "Famous First Lines" boards and I thought that was such an awesome way to get kids excited about new books, so I decided to make one of my own. (Please excuse the bent shelf on the bookshelf - that drives me crazy!)
Last, but not least (especially because this took the longest to set up) is my classroom library! This year we got lots of new books from Booksource and Donorschoose and I am so excited about all of the awesome titles I have to share with the kids! I decided to level my books, organize them by genre, and create a checkout system that would be easy to maintain.
Then, I took some Avery labels and just printed color onto them Like so:
As I was putting books onto the shelves, I scanned them in to my Booksource Classroom Library (which is totally free by the way!) and labeled them with the colored stickers by reading level using a key that I made up.
For the books that weren't already leveled on Booksource, I just used my Scholastic Bookwizard app to scan the barcodes and get the information that I needed. Here is an example of the information you can find on Scholastic's Bookwizard:
During the first week of school I taught my classes how to check out books and they've been loving our new library system! I am loving the fact that I can finally keep track of where my books are disappearing to AND I can monitor each student's independent reading :)
I'm saving our first week activities for another post so stay tuned!
No comments