It’s the start of another year, and thankfully this year I don’t have to have completely separate tables/desks spaced 6 feet apart. A year of that was PLENTY! Even though there are still spacing protocols in place, my classroom feels more like a classroom this year, and for that I am grateful. While last year was crazy and chaotic with all of the changes yet monotonous and dull being stuck at the front of a room keeping eyes glued to a Zoom screen while trying to interact with my in-person learners, it certainly pushed me to try some new things. […]
Category: Classroom Setup
One of the bulletin boards I always set up at the beginning of the year is my Greek and Latin Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes board. It starts out blank, but by the end of the year, it is packed with cards and we refer to it quite often as we are reading or discussing vocabulary. Some years I just add cards as we go, sometimes I post them by word part, and one year we had so many cards that I took them down halfway through the year and put them back in alphabetical order. I’ve been adding new cards
This laptop cart has been quite a project! Getting all of the parts that fit the way I wanted to hold the computers was no easy feat! I needed the cart from IKEA specifically so the middle shelf could be adjusted… and that took about a month to get here. Luckily, I found some cheap file folder holders at Ocean State and zip ties at the Dollar Store. Amazon had the colored washi tape and power strips that could hold a bunch of wide plugs. Then a few laptops had plugs on the top, others were too big for the
I still don’t know what our school has planned as far as in-person, virtual, or hybrid learning. But I know that at some point we will be back in the building. So, in preparation, I created a set of social distance greeting signs. Hopefully, they will help students connect with one another, even while being far apart. In past years, I’ve tried doing the individual greetings with each child, but I was never great at remembering what steps there were for each child. I’m thinking I may try it again this year, and with a visual reminder of the choices,
I love anchor charts. I hate hanging anchor charts on my walls. They either take up precious bulletin board space, or they constantly fall down (or just wave at me from one droopy corner). So, a few years ago, I created a set of mini anchor charts for my tables using IKEA’s Tolsby Frames. After much frustration to get everything just the right size, I finally had a small set of charts. Multiplication chart, synonyms for overused words, math talk stems, commonly misspelled words, and more. And I also made some cute motivational cards to keep it fun and positive!
This took quite a while to put together, but thank goodness for the circle hole punch! All that is left to do is attach it to the door (but I’ll wait until the Summer Camp kids have left so it doesn’t ruin the surprise!)
Like all teachers at this time of the year, I’ve been busy getting the classroom ready. I’ve moved back into a room I had a few years ago with blue walls, so the blue fabric bulletin boards from the last few years had to be retired and the lime green came back out. I think I may have gone a little overboard, and I’m eagerly anticipating getting some student work up on the walls! The classroom library had a small overhaul to even out the genre baskets. Over the years, I’ve gotten new books and some have gone mysteriously missing,
DIY Project #1: I was cleaning out some old kindergarten supplies and came across the purple drawer container which used to house all of my alphabet stamps. I thought it could be a cute desk holder for all of those knick-knacks that get cluttered around, so I brought it home for a little TLC. I peeled off all the old ABC stickers and gave it a good cleaning, printed out some new labels and taped them on (I would have put them on the inside, but the label goo didn’t come off), and then painted the outside with an acrylic
One of my biggest pet peeves about classroom jobs is the kids not doing them regularly (my custodian agrees when the trash cans aren’t put out into the hall at the end of the day!) So, when I started the year, I decided to put job descriptions right on the job cards! I also wanted to include some more challenging jobs for students who wanted to go above and beyond in the classroom. And so, a new set of jobs was born… 9 regular jobs (green with yellow name tags) which would be changed every two weeks, and the 5
I came to the sudden realization the other day that except for the little welcome bird I made, my doors were quite empty! Worse yet, I have two doors to my classroom. So, a quick Pinterest search, a hunt for fonts, a little scrapbook paper… and voila! It’s nothing too fancy, but I like that it gives credence to so many different roles that students may take on within the course of a day in my classroom.