New Beginnings

I have been having the most fun setting up my new classroom. I am quite pleased with how things look and I have lots of pictures to show you! This is my room when I first moved my stuff in and did a little bit of work. I forgot to take any pictures of how the room looked before I moved in but you get the idea.

 This is the bathroom and the closet. Look at all this storage!

This is the nicest classroom I have ever taught in! I love all the storage and I am so excited about  all the space and using the Eno board with my kiddos.

Here is what the classroom looks like now!

 Please disregard my lack of curtains. I still need to put up the other short green curtain that fell and make some big curtains out of pink fabric that we can use to block out the light at nap time. I love how everything turned out and I can't wait to fill my room with sweet three year olds come Monday morning! Hope your school year is getting off to a good start as well!

It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

There's something about this time of year that I just love. Ever since I was little, I loved going back to school. I loved picking out school supplies and getting a new backpack and getting back to a routine. It's still the same even though I'm a teacher. I'm thrilled when the school supplies are out on store shelves and spend time perusing the aisles. I love getting my plan book organized, getting a new lunchbox or coffee mug, getting a new teacher bag and of course getting classroom supplies!

As the summer draws to a close, I find myself getting more and more excited about the fall. I've been busy pinning and planning. I am still loving the pink, lime green and orange with touches of black theme in my room. This year I'm also doing owls so I've been having lots of fun finding cute things!

I've been preparing for my move to teaching 3s by changing up some of my classroom decorations. This year will be my 6th year of teaching so I'm kinda bored with a lot of the stuff I have from when I first taught. All I can say is thank God for Teachers Pay Teachers! I've bought some of the cutest things that I can't wait to laminate and use in my classroom!

Please note that these are in no way mine and I don't hold any claim to them other than I think they are wonderful! I just LOVE the owl color posters! Click on the pictures to go to the TPT pages.

I also plan on getting some items from Thirty-One. I've been ogling their bags for quite some time now and I think its time to take the plunge. Especially since I'll be commuting about 40 minutes each way at this new job it will be important for me to stay organized.

I love this  Large Utility Tote. I plan on getting it embroidered with my first initial in lime green thread.

Super cute right? You can click on the pictures to check them out for yourself!

Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I am a coffee addict. I usually have at least one cup of hot coffee in the morning and sometimes have an iced coffee as an afternoon pick me up. Since pretty much all of my time is spent at school I've developed quite the collection of travel mugs and usually have at least 2 or 3 lying around my classroom at any given time. I love buying cute new mugs at the beginning of the year and this year is no exception. I've got my eye on these super adorable mugs from Target. I love the mason jar, the handle, and they have them in all 3 of my colors. Too precious!

I hope you enjoyed seeing my planned back to school purchases. Just so you know, I'm not affiliated with any of the things or getting paid or anything like that. I just wanted to share. Hope you are enjoying the last days of summer!

Summertime and the Living is Easy

I love summer. I love getting to sleep in, read books and do whatever I feel like doing. So far my summer has been filled with fun friends, good books and hanging out with these two handsome gentlemen.

It has also been filled with job searching which is never pleasant. But I am excited to say that the anxiety and resume sending have paid off. I will be teaching a PK 3 class next year!

I am so excited about working with three year olds and getting to do so many fun things! I've been pinteresting like crazy trying to prepare for the changes and challenges I will face. Its all a bit overwhelming but still very exciting!

I'm looking forward to all the fun things I will be doing this year and I can't wait to share them with you!

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!

Classroom Tour & Freebies

Hello bloggy friends! I’ve been super busy getting my room ready for Monday. I just finished the physical setup yesterday and now I’m working on lesson planning and getting beginning of the year stuff taken care of.  I am so excited about this year! I really think I’m going to love 1^st grade. I have a great team of ladies I’ll be working with and a lot of fun ideas!

So here’s a little tour of my classroom…

This is the hallway outside of my classroom. I will be creating an interactive bulletin board on the large board and hanging student work from rings on the clothespins. The plan is to write the kiddos names on the clips and add their pictures above their names. I want to keep adding work each month to the ring to create a portfolio of work that parents and other teachers and students will be able to see. The great thing is that the whole hallway belongs to 1^st so we can use the other spaces to hang work as well!

 My door which I totally love! I’ll write the kids names on the owls when I get my roster.

 This is the wall to the left as you walk through the door. Because of the position of the reading loft, I decided to use the small space behind the door as my desk. I love how cozy it is! I never sit at my desk when the kids are in the room so it’s nice to have it tucked away but still accessible if I need something. 

 A horribly blurry (sorry!) close up of my desk! I'll post a better picture when I get in my room tomorrow.

 This is the door to the bathroom between my room and the room next door. Since the door is metal, I plan on applying magnet tape to my reading and math workstation cards and organizing the kiddos that way.  You can also see my math manipulative shelf & sink area.

 This is the wall directly opposite the door.  I’ve since rearranged the desks so it looks a bit different now. I love the huge windows and all of the light they provide. I’m going to try and see if I can do something about the frosted coating on the lower windows. I’d love to be able to have a bird feeder or something like that outside the room for the kids.  The whole group area will be in right corner. I have a rug coming that I plan on putting there.

 The front of my room! I used flat sheets from Walmart to cover my boards. After seeing this post on the Clutter Free Classroom blog, I decided to use all black borders this year. I love how organized it makes everything look.

 My class library! I have a cute rug coming to soften up the area. I also plan on painting the metal shelves white sometime soon. I have A LOT of things to say about how I organized and leveled my library over the summer so be prepared for a more in depth post soon!

 I love how these boards turned out! They are foam board covered in paper and border hung on a nail by a ribbon. I plan on using them for spelling words, Social Studies & Science, vocabulary words or whatever else I might want to do.

This is the wall by my door. You can see the animal goodbye rhymes, my rules and some signs I previously posted.  I think the flower clock is my favorite. Thank goodness for Pinterest!

So as promised, I have freebies for you! A lot of these things are things you can see in the photos of my classroom.

Can’t Sign – I really don't like it when kids say that they can’t do something. I'm all about letting kids know that some things will be difficult but with work, we can get through them. I’m using this little sign as a tool to reinforce that.

Welcome Letters – I printed these on colored paper and hung them in my window. You will notice in the document that instead of a W for welcome I have a M. This is because the W in the font I used is very wide and got cut off. I just hung the M upside down and it looks fine.  I've made them for K-5.

K 1 2 3 4 5

Classroom Rules – This year I plan on using Whole Brain Teaching techniques in my classroom and I tweaked my rules accordingly. You can get more info on their website here.

Brownie Points – I use the as a whole class incentive. I use these with the cookie sheet hanging on my whiteboard. Every time the whole class makes a good choice, a brownie goes in the pan. When the pan is filled I bring in brownies as a special snack!

Sub Binder Form – I’m currently getting my sub binder together. This is a form I made for the sub to fill out for me.

Brain Breaks – I laminated these and glued them on popsicle sticks. I plan on using these small activities to help my kids when they need a little break.

Thank You Letters – I plan on taking a class picture with my kiddos holding these up. I will then print the picture on half of a sheet of paper and fold it to make a thank you card.

I hope that everyone is having a great week so far. I hope you can use these freebies in your room. Thanks for letting me share my classroom with you!

Sorry!

I'm sorry I've been MIA but things have been crazy around here! I'm setting up my new classroom and it's taking up all of my time & energy! I promise to have pictures and tons of freebies very soon!