What I've Been Up To.... A Peek into my Classroom

The beginning of the 2012-2013 school year is creeping up on me....I have less than 2 weeks until a brand new set of firsties greet me at my door!  Ahhh!  I am so excited to meet them, but need to finish getting ready.  I still have a family vacation to fit in as well so I have been busy setting up, as well as cleaning my room.  I decided that I am a packrat when it comes to school stuff...you never know when I might need that!

One thing I got done was an overhaul on my classroom library with some new jungle themed book basket labels.  Maybe someday I'll paint all those baskets so they match like so many creative teachers out there!  I put stickers on my books with a matching sticker on the basket label so the kiddos have a better chance at putting their books away correctly.  I decided to go a step further with using clips this year with their number on them to also help.  When they get a book they will put a clip on that basket.  They only get two clips at the beginning of the year so this will also slow down the "hogging" of favorite books!

Another thing I accomplished was to figure out a way to display those core standards without using a whole bunch of velcro.  I found Deanna Jump's file of the first grade standards and decided hers would be alot easier than me making them, but I didn't want to display them the way she suggested-only because I am a cheap skate and am always trying to figure out how to do things/get things for free or fairly cheap.  Anyways, she suggests velcro-well as you all know velcro is expensive.  So this is what I came up with:

As you can see I have an odd space to the left of my projector screen-which worked perfect for this.  I made some subject headers Jungle Themed of course, printed on cardstock and laminated.  I also laminated all of the 1st grade common core standards.  Then I punched a hole on either end of the cards.  (Even the subjects in case they need to changed out.)  I then used small ended thumbtacks to "hang" my standards on.  Here's a closer (a bit blurry) view:

Another project (besides cleaning, cleaning, and cleaning) that I do every year is mere decoration.  I make hanging names to greet all of students on the first day of school.  They usually stay up for 3 weeks before they begin to drive me crazy.  I punch out letters for each child's name from the ellison machine, staple them together, punch a whole on the top and then hang from my ceiling.  The students usually can't wait for them to come down either because they want to hang them up in their own rooms at home!

{Picture of names hanging in my room COMING SOON!}

I also worked on pulling my Jungle Books back together and organizing student math tool kits.  Pictures and info to come soon.....I have a list of things to do as I head in tomorrow to finish up a bunch of little things.

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