Classroom Pictures …. in November

Happy Black Friday!!!!
I got a ton of online shopping done this morning! I am not a big fan of shopping in all those crowds, I much prefer to sit at home in my PJ’s with a cup of coffee and get it all done from there! My family does a secret Santa gift exchange, and now, most of my family creates an Amazon wish list, and we can choose from items on there, I love it!!! Also, when searching for gifts for my friends, I just spy on their pinterest account and get them things that they have pinned on their boards : ) Either I’m creative and time efficient or just lazy, but I’m going to go with efficient : )

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I vowed that I would finally get the pictures of my classroom done, so that the “My Classroom” button on my blog would actually go somewhere. I went in on Wednesday, and took a bunch of pictures with my iPhone 4s. I got back home and uploaded them, but most of them were blurry : ( I’m don’t get an upgrade until February, or maybe I’ll win the lotto soon and be able to afford a fancy camera! Anywho, I dragged my husband into school with me yesterday so that we could use his iPhone 6. The camera on that one is a million times better than mine! Anywho, let’s begin the tour! Here is a look at my whole classroom from the South West end.

This area is to the left of the white board. At the beginning of our group time we review the jobs for the day, and the classroom rules with hand motions. My center labels are in this area as well.

I use clothespin with the students’ numbers on them to assign my class jobs. One of these days I will get around to making them cute with washi tape : )

I assign my centers by animals. They are heterogeneously grouped. We don’t do centers everyday because Monday and Wednesday are filled with special classes, and Friday’s are quite often mini days for professional development and staff meetings.

My magnet area is below this. I used a “fill your bucket” pocket chart to house my magnets, and my husband installed an oil drip pan from Wal-mart on the side of the pocket chart for magnetic activities.

My white board has an area sectioned off for our SLE’s (School wide Learning Expectations), lesson objective, bible verse and spelling words of the week. The SLE’s are expectations that the school has created as a goal for what the students will have accomplished when they graduate from our school.

In the past, for my spelling words I had my students work on sight words, but this year I purchased Khrys Bosland’s pack: Supplemental Spelling Program for Kindergarten This product is meant to follow along with the Reading Street language arts program. We do not have a Common Core language arts program yet, so I thought I would give this try, and I am absolutely loving it!!! I am really seeing a big change in their reading, writing, and sounds blending and segmentation skills because of this!

My library got a major overhaul this summer. Why are those plastic bins so expensive?!?! I used Maria Manore’s library pack : Editable Classroom Library Labels. I used some of her labels, and created some of my own with her easy to use template. It was quite a project, but I like how it turned out.

I use the larger boxes for my fiction collections, and the smaller boxes for my non-fiction collections, and other small book collections. The white boxes are my students’ book boxes that I purchase new every year from IKEA.

I also have a section for my leveled books that I use for my guided reading meetings, and that the students take home to practice with.

This is my calendar area, I went in to switch everything over to December, hence the Christmas decorations : )

I use Deedee Wills poetry pack for extra language arts practice, and I love it! I have also started using Deanna Jump and Deedee Wills Common Core Guiding Kinders math units this year, and they are wonderfully thorough!

For my calendar pieces, I created a year long pack that I sell in my TPT shop. It has different month themes, and different patterns to practice. In my class, the calendar person calls on someone to name what picture will be next in the pattern, and on another person to name the pattern. i.e. December = ABBC.

On the right side of my white board, I have my “how many days have we been in school” count, 100’s poster, graphing question of the week, behavior chart, and schedule. (This is obviously a picture I took with my 4s : )

Here is a picture of my word wall from the beginning of the year. I start with just the students names at the beginning, and we grow from there. I put up letter owls, and put flash cards from our Open Court language arts program in the same box, just as a picture reminder of the sound.

This is my center area, which I probably like the least out of anything in my classroom. The students find their work or materials in the boxes on the shelf, and when they are done, they return it to the drawers up above.

In the future, I would like something more like this:

Once again, when I win the lottery ….

Here is our donation door. Parents at our school have to put in 20 hours of service per family. If they can not come in to do hours, they can always donate money. 1 hour = $5. I use this door to let parents know what they could buy for our class if they would like to complete their hours that way.

I wrote more about that in this post, and there is a freebie to go along with it!

Here is a picture of our computer area. I allow my students to use computers as part of early finishers activities. Our school website has a great kids page that has all sorts of educational games. They’re learning and they just think they’re playing games, ha! We also use computers during center time.

Here is a picture of my messy teacher area. I work in a very old part of the school. We have those old heaters there, but they don’t work, and are not connected just in case anyone is concerned : )

Here is some of my paper storage. I try to make everything accessible to the students and teach them to be responsible for the classroom as a whole, and not to over use paper. The majority of them are very good about it.