Classroom Tour 2014

Hello everyone! It's FRIDAY! Totally my favorite day of the week! As promised here is a tour of my classroom this year!

 This is the view of my room looking from the door. Other than an area to the right, this is pretty much it. My classroom is small compared to many Pre-K classrooms but with our 3 year old classes maxing out at 14 the space suits us perfectly!

 This is a small reading area and our morning command center. When the kiddos unpack their bags they come in, drop their folder in a bucket and flip their card in the pocket chart. One side has their name and the other has their face. Every morning it starts on the name side and they have to find their name and flip it over to find their face! I mix it up as the year progresses to make sure they are learning their name and not just memorizing their spot. The pictures make it self checking and its a great way to see attendance at a glance!

Our cabinets where all my important teacher resources are kept - note the Keurig Machine! ;) I've been organizing my teaching resources into binders this year and I LOVE it! I keep one binder per letter of the alphabet and one for our monthly colors numbers and shapes. This helps me find things so much more easily and makes planning with my coworkers a breeze! 

I also love using the plastic drawers for organizing weekly work. I have one drawer for each day of the week and one To-Do. I put all the things I need my assistant to do in the last drawer and as she finishes them she files them into the weekly drawers. Each day I just need to open the drawer and everything I need is there!

Our whole group area. Here we do morning meeting and calendar every day as well as do alot of fun things on our Eno Board! 

Want to know one of my favorite things about whole group time? Using pointers!Its just one of those things that I couldn't wait to do as a kid and I get a kick out of it still! I started making pointers out of pre-painted wooden shapes after seeing this post on First Grader... at Last! a few years back. This summer I decided to add a pointer for every letter of the alphabet to reinforce the sounds each week. Now I have a big bucket of beautiful glittery pointers that the kiddos and I both absolutely LOVE!

 This is a closer look at my small group table and our focus board. I put the skills we are working on each week as a visual reminder for the kiddos. At this table I do work with 3-4 students at a time in differentiated groups during our center time.

 I work in a Catholic school so we have a prayer table integrated into our room. Next to that is the kitchen center. One of the struggles I have with such a small room is center time. There is not a lot of room for kiddos to spread out and play so I mix some permanent centers like the kitchen and reading  with other more portable tabletop centers.

 I hope you enjoyed getting a peek into my home away from home! Before you leave I want to show you what I made today. I present you with Mr. Muncher!

Isn't he the cutest? I made him using a small swing top trashcan and laminated card stock with a little hot glue. I plan on using him each week to reinforce letter sounds. I purchased these letter cards on Amazon to use with him which are very sturdy laminated small cards perfect for little hands! If you'd like to snag the sign I made for his front you can get it here.

I hope your weekend is getting off to a wonderful start!

MIA

Hello bloggy world! Yes it's been a while. I officially suck. I'm sorry for not blogging in forever. Things have been crazy busy this school year! It's safe to say that this year has been my most challenging school year yet! I've been working crazy long hours and I've been exhausted when I get home. But it's no excuse and I'm ready to get back into the swing of things.

I'm gonna ease myself back into the blog world by sharing with you how I organized my classroom library. This summer I had the luxury of having all my classroom stuff stored at my apartment. I've been wanting to get my classroom library organized for years now and this was my opportunity.

I was looking into getting one of those fancy scanners when I came across Booksource's Classroom Organizer. WOW! With this website you can log in all of your books by simply entering the ISBN. Even better, if you have an iPhone, you can download their free app and use your phone to scan the ISBN. It's awesome! Plus, you can add all kinds of information beyond title & author, you can put the price, reading level, location in your classroom & more. You can also export your information into an Excel spreadsheet. I did this and put it in a binder in my classroom and it's made finding my books so much easier.

I figured that since I was already putting each book's information into the database I might as well take the time to level all my books as well. This is where the luxury of being able to do it in my pjs while watching a movie comes in! The first place I turned to to level my books was the Scholastc Book Wizard. Sadly, a lot of the books I had either weren't on the site or they didn't have a level listed. This is where the AR Book Finder  and this Lexile Text Conversion Table came in. Using these, I was able to level almost all of my remaining books.

After getting all my books leveled I started to organize them. I decided to organize them by author and holiday and then sort the rest by level. The books I wasn't able to level I sorted by fiction & non fiction. My most favorite part by far was being able to log in the location of each book.  I was able to put in exactly which bin I was putting the books in. Now when I need to find a book I just look at my spreadsheet, find which bin it's in & grab it! It also makes it easy to lend books to coworkers because they can look up things themselves and get what they need.

The most tedious part was labeling all the books. I printed paper labels and attached them to the books with clear laminate. I made it so that my small labels on the books matched my large bin labels so that children could put them back easier. It was a lot of work but it's so nice to have all 600+ of my books accounted for, labeled and put away neatly!

Check out my TPT store to snag everything I made for my library!  Thanks for hanging in there and staying with me as I traverse this hectic year!

I'm Still Here + Freebies!

 Hello all! I've been enjoying some much needed R&R time but I'm back and ready to share some of what I've been up to! The first few weeks of break were dominated by a lot of sleeping in, baking, sewing, & hours of watching my new obsession, Game of Thrones. Unfortunately it's also included many hours of jury duty which has not been as enjoyable. I'm a little over halfway finished with my 8 days so I'm thankful for that!

As of right now, I don't know a whole lot about next year so my main focus has been mostly organizing my stuff and undertaking little craft projects. I'm supposed to be having lunch with my new division team sometime soon so I'll be able to know more about the meat & potatoes of what I'll be teaching next year.  

 

I've been wanting one of those 10 drawer carts for quite some time but I haven't been willing to drop the $70-$100 that some places charge for them. So you can imagine my delight when I found one for $30 at Walmart! When I got it home, I wasn't too impressed with the colors so I decided to use some spray paint to make the drawers match my new classroom color scheme.

 Pretty cute huh?

I'm all about affordable storage so I use copy paper boxes to store a lot of my things. I love them because I get them free from the teacher's lounge and they are nice and sturdy. What I don't love about them is that they are pretty ugly.

 See what I mean?

So as I was sitting in my apt. one night I was looking at the boxes and decided to try to use a little craft paint to make them cuter. I love the way they turned out!

I am seriously in love with how cute & organized everything is now. 

So to make up for my absence, I've got some freebies for you! The first is a few line up songs and rhymes I found around the internet that I plan to use with my kiddos. I'm gonna glue these to scrapbook paper and hang them a ring by my door for line up time. The second freebie is some animal goodbye rhymes. I'm going to put these on scrapbook paper and make a poster to use at the end of the day. I hope you enjoy them!

Line Up Songs

Animal Goodbye Rhymes

Well, I'm off to do a bit of pinning and blog hopping while I wait to be released from jury duty for the day. Happy Tuesday everyone!

Glitter, To-Do Lists, & Freebies!

As I'm driving home today, the sunlight hits me just right and I realize that I am just covered in glitter. I mean like creepy sparkly vampire covered. I was working on a project today so I figured I probably had some on me but I had no idea! Thank God I didn't have any after work errands to run. Has that ever happened to y'all? It never fails for me: after work errand + close proximity to a cute guy = definite smudge of paint, marker, glitter, or some other kind of crafty schmutz on my face that I find after the fact. It just comes with the job I guess.

So, they say that a clear desk equals a clear mind. I'm not so sure my mind is all that clear but man, look at my desk!

(Insert chorus of angels here.) I've been in hyper organization mode lately and my desk was a recent project.  My desk is usually pretty neat but of course I've been in the mood to streamline everything so now it's uber neat!. So that brings me to what I have for you today. More freebies! If you look closely at my desk you will see my to do list. Its just a piece of paper I printed and put in a frame from Dollar Tree. I just use a dry erase marker to write stuff and erase when I'm done! 

The one you see is what I made at the beginning of this school year. I've recently revamped it to match my new color scheme and cute labels. Now, if only I could pick which one I want to use first! You will find the one pictured above as well as the new ones below. Enjoy!

Black & White To Do List

Green To Do List

Orange To Do List

Pink To Do List

All four are also in my TPT store here.

Oh, and before I forget, the super awesome digital paper I've been using to create my stuff can be found at Mel Stampz awesome blog here. Happy Wednesday!

Organization Makes Me Happy

So as I'm downloading all the free goodies from the awesome teacher appreciation jackpot going on today, I thought I'd share an awesome tip! Use adhesive laminate to attach labels to plastic boxes. Duh! Why didn't I think of that before?

So as of right now, I don't know where I'll be teaching next year. With a less than a month left of school, I'm doing a lot of organizing and separating my personal stuff from that of my co-teacher. I usually keep my things in plastic containers and label the front with tape. It works well but isn't all that cute. Things are organized but they don't really look that way.

That's where the loveliness of clear laminate comes in! I bought the laminate that comes in single sheets - not the pouches - and cut it to be a little bigger than my labels.  

Then all I had to do was put the label front side down onto the laminate and attach it to the box. SO easy! I usually use packing tape to do this kind of thing but this was so much easier, neater looking and more durable. Now I'm thinking of how many things I could label like this!

Ah, I feel so much better now! It's nice to have everything nicely organized, labeled and looking cute. Now if only everything else in my life could be this organized!