This year I made some trees canopy around the SMART board. Now it looks a lot more fun and inviting. For those who don't know what a SMART board is just think about it as being a giant iPad. Kids can go up to it move things around on the screen and interact with it. As a teaching tool I find that it helps keep the kids engaged and it reaches all types of learning styles.
Our calendar time is going to be awesome this year! Mainly I am excited because I have an actual bulletin board for it (my old room did not have one). This year we are not just focusing on months, days of the week, dates and the year. During this time we will also have a math question each day to answer that is aligned with the Common Core State standards. We will also talk about place value, what it means to have hundreds, tens, or ones. Finally we will also look at the different ways we can show a number. For instance the number five can be written in word form, as a numeral, as five tally marks, or as five things (cookies, birds, toys). We will also go into how to decompose numbers. An example of decomposing the number five would be 2 + 3 equals 5.
I this is a view of the left side of the classroom as you are walking in. This is the key place for students to go every morning. It is where they will sign in, turn in notes, turn in their take home folder, submit homework, turn in box tops, and where they will put their lunch box if they are packing their lunch that day. It is important for students to get in the habit of coming to this part of the classroom every day to complete the morning routine.
Cubbies are kind of like student mailboxes. Each student is assigned one cubby, it is where they put their work to go home and where I put important information for parents. Students pack up everything in their cubby at the end of each day.
This year I made an actual word wall for students to refer to. Students are expected to learn over 50 sight words this year. After learning each word I will post it on this wall so that students can learn to use it in their everyday writing.
The Common Core State Standards also known as CCSS are the standards by which our curriculum is built. It is on this wall where I will put up the standards that we are focusing on in science, social studies, math, reading, writing, and language. I will explain the CCSS better and in more detail at Open House so make sure you come on September 9th at 6:30pm!
This is an overall view of the classroom. You can see where students will be sitting at the tables and where some of the items are in the classroom. One of my favorite things this year are the giant pom poms hanging from the ceiling!! It puts such a smile on my face to see the owls in those pom poms. It's like they are sitting in a bush watching over everything! Just too cute! Can I just say that it was very difficult at first for me to figure out how to make those pom poms! However, Pinterest had a great tutorial! The purpose of the owls besides being cute is to help designate what 'color' each table is.
This is the final picture I have of the classroom. It just shows another view of the student tables. The door in the far left corner leads to the class bathroom and the door at the back of the room leads to the playground outside. As a quick note we do have a small sink and water fountain in the room however, my messy black cart is blocking the view of them.
I hope you all enjoyed the pictures and to my future students get ready to come find your table, cubby, and locker! To parents and guardians thank you all so much for entrusting me with your child this year. I look forward to teaching each and every one of them. I will post some more pictures sometime soon when the room is 100% done! Also remember if you are a parent of a student in my class this year please fill out the parent contact form I posted about last week. Only I see what you write, the information goes directly to me and no one else sees it. See you Monday for the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!!! (Can you tell I'm excited?!)
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