Me Bags

I always do a welcome back to school activity so that the class and I can get to know each other.  On the first day of school, kids came in to find a large paper sack on their desk.  I had one on my desk too which I had decorated with a large self portrait.  As the kids came in, I instructed them to get started on drawing their own self portrait.  This gave me time to greet students and parents as they arrived and also collect materials.  In the afternoon, I shared some items in my bag with the class (I had some photos, books, souvenirs from trips etc.)  Next I explained their homework assignment for the first week.  They did an excellent job and shared their Me Bags with the class today!

My Classroom

Here are some photos of my classroom.  I have moved things around every year, but so far I am loving my new setup!  

This is the bulletin board that you see when you first walk in the room.  I use it as an organizational board.  I keep my conduct system on it, my homework monitoring system, my helper board, my smarty pants motivational tool, and copies of the pledges on this board.

I got the ideas for the smarty pants and conduct system from browsing on pinterest. I will post links to the originators of these ideas as soon as I have some more time.  This is my favorite conduct system I have used so far because it has positive behaviors as well as warnings and consequences.  The smarty pants have been a lot of fun.  I bought the jeans at Target and stitched the legs closed so I could fill up the top part with Smarties candies.  When a student shows that they are learning new concepts or vocabulary words, they get a smarty pants!

This is my word wall.  We add about 5 sight words to the wall each week.  All week long we practice reading them and using them in sentences.  Students are expected to use this wall to spell the words on it correctly. 

This is my calendar math bulletin board.  I use Everyday Counts Calendar Math.  Each day we add the number of days we have been in school to the number line, add a dot to our tens and ones board, and add discuss the patterns of the calendar piece.  I also have the students come up with number sentences in a fact family to describe the number of the day.  We us this in the Frayer Model activity, which I will post about later on.  Later we will add hundred chart and clock activities to our daily routine.  

This is the rug area where you can see my easel and author's chair.  This is where I will sit to do group reading lessons.  In the background you can see my Eno board projecting my class website: sites.google.com/site/mrsfeinmansclass

Here is the library corner.  I have my books sorted by genre and by level so that students can find books they are interested in as well as books that they can read easily.  We keep bean bags and pillows in the library corner to make our time there more comfortable and enjoyable.  You can also see the listening station and work station management chart in this picture.  I will post more on our work stations later on.  

First blog entry

I am excited to start this blog to record the fun activities and teaching strategies that I use in my classroom each day. I hope that this will help to motivate me to be creative and communicate with other teachers and parents. We'll see how well I do keeping up with it!