First Week Complete!

I can't believe that school has already started and we've already finished the first week of school! It's been such a whirlwind!

Does anyone else ever find it hard to connect with their new group at the beginning of the school year? A lot of times, I think back to my previous class who already knew all the routines and I had trained to be super fabulous and thinking about getting my new class to that point is a bit overwhelming. Well, this year that is not the case! As of today, I have twenty-five super amazing little seven-year-olds in my class. My husband keeps rolling his eyes at me because I come home every day raving about how amazing these kiddos are! I'm so excited for this school year - I can't even stop saying it! 

There was one day this week where we were practicing independent reading for small group reading. We flex group during this time, so I had a mix of students from other classes as well. We had gotten to the point of practicing and they were so good at it and I was so excited that I ran over to my camera and started taking pictures of them just sitting there. It was amazing. Ahhh! This year is going to be so fabulous!

Anyway, I thought I'd check in here to give you a peek at my classroom. I did a lot of work over the summer to clean it up and give it a real polished look.

Here's the hallway display! I love, love displaying their work with clips. Especially since I don't have an actual bulletin board. It is seriously time consuming to have to display word on cinder blocks without clips!

This is my objectives board. Our team decided to call them learning targets. This was before school started and I ran out of mounting tabs, so I only put one objective up. Hopefully you get the idea!

Here are our classroom rules. I shared these a while ago, but they are up right now. I'm super excited about them, especially now that I've seen them in action. Rule #5 is probably my absolute favorite to see during the day. You can purchase my rules here!

This is the other side of my board. It's where I post my weekly posters, the sounds that we're learning about this week and our vocabulary words for the week. I'm still on the fence about whether I'm going to put math vocabulary in the math section or something else.

Here's a wide view of the front of our classroom. All of our classrooms were fitted with TeamBoards this summer which has been awesome. There's also a final board on the left that I can't find a close picture of. On that board, we record our test scores and make goals for future testing.

Next up - my updated word wall! I went through and recreated my word wall letters and words. I had to force myself to do it since I had spent quite a bit of time doing it last year also, but the kiddos just needed bigger words and letters so they were visible. Please excuse the fact that I have B words listed under E. I have no idea why I put them there!

Every year, we get a small budget to purchase new items for our classrooms. This year, I purchased these bins to give the area above our backpacks a more clean look. I love how it turned out. We store our community school supplies and student math manipulatives in the bins.

This was another fun summer project. This classroom wall used to be an exterior wall. Now it butts up to the office's conference room. For some reason, when they made the switch, they decided to simply paint what used to be a window. This summer, we added some cork board to make it more functional. Our school has a Pride Board that features outstanding work from one student in each class. I wanted to give the kids in my class more of an opportunity, so this is one just for our room.

This is my small group reading board to help me keep organized. I decided to laminate paper this year for listing the kids in each group instead of printing the group lists. I want my groups to be flexible, so this makes it much easier. I can just erase whenever I need to make a change.

I'm going to need to train a student to switch these each day because I'm so bad at remembering to, but I love how this looks! You can find the free, editable schedule cards here from Kelli! They come in a whole bunch of colors.

Here's a view of my reading table area. It was still a little messy when I took the picture.

Here's a view of my desks. Each student has their own cup to keep their everyday supplies. All their other supplies either go in their 'art box' (read: pencil box that I don't want them playing with all day) or in our community supply bins.

I got the idea of the numbers and letters from The Brown Bag Teacher. Her info probably describes it much better than I can, but I'll let you know some of the ways I plan to use this tool. I call helpers from each table all the time. Each of my tables as a number 1, 2, 3, and 4 to make it easier to get a volunteer from each table. It also lets me organize students if I want them to discuss with their group. If I want them to share their answer, I can tell them that number 2's get to share first. The As and Bs are the same idea, but they are for when students word with a single partner at their table. I can let them know that partner A gets to talk first or partner B.

Finally, here are two shots 'whole' classroom shots.

So that's my classroom this year! What do you think?