Cover Me! I'm Going In... (to my classroom)

That's what I felt like this "morning" when I finally psyched myself up to go into my classroom.  I am lucky enough to have had today off from the restaurant, and I don't have to go in until late evening for the rest of the week, and I have no other prior commitments... which means... I can go to school!  Now let me explain the title of this post... my classroom has been used for almost the entire summer for one thing or another, up until the week before last, but last week I was at the literacy institute so I couldn't go work in my room.  So since bodies have been in and out of my room all summer, I wasn't sure what I was going to be walking into.  Let me just say that I was pleasantly surprised!  Everything was pretty much how I left it, and of course I brought my camera along to document the process of putting my room back in order.  Enjoy!



I rearranged this corner right at the end of the year... as you can tell from the wall, my library used to be in this corner



look at all the green paper keeping the dust off my stuff



more green paper, and look!!  I have tables!  (I'm trying tables for the first time ever this year)



oh, what a lovely pile of who-knows-what!

 Once I was over the initial overwhelming sense of being back in my classroom, I snatched all that green paper and filled up the recycling bin, time to see just what I shoved where during my last minute decision to rearrange my meeting area and library...


phew!  bulletin boards look alright



SOOO many books, at least they're already organized... sort of...



word wall made it through the summer in tact, nice!



what to do with all those cords??



where'd my whiteboard border go?



DonorsChoose kidney table with "DO NOT INVENTORY" all over it... this table has caused quite a few headaches, and a few tears, too... but it made it through furniture inventory without magically becoming county property, so I WIN!!!



Alright, so at the end of the year I moved a filing cabinet that was beside my desk to join the filing cabinet that you see in this picture.  The idea was to decrease the amount of "teacher space" that I take up in this room, and downsize the dead space under the window.  My desk has to be near the window because that's where the projector business is (remember all those cords?).  So I moved the filing cabinet, and it made my teacher area smaller-ish.  But then this rolling book cart decided to be a problem.  It stuck out far too much.  So I moved one of the filing cabinets to the area next to the bathroom, since it holds miscellaneous stuff anyway, I didn't need it near my desk.  Moving it gave the rolling cart enough room to exist without completely closing off my kidney table, and both sides of the cart are still accessible.  WOOT! 



leveled readers live on this cart, and student book boxes live on the bookshelf where the leveled readers are now... lots of rearranging in my future!



random filing cabinet's new home, behind the backpack cubby

 So that's it... day one.  I also laminated my new border and nameplates since our Media Specialist won't be back at school until Monday (when we report for pre-planning).  I'll be back tomorrow with more updates!

blast from the past

Just a quick post before the kiddos get here this morning, I swear that the solar storms are still going on in my house, the internet flat-out refused to work yesterday...

So we're chugging along in our study of fairy tales, and my "Frog Prince" book has a record that goes with it.  The kiddos were so confused by this strange object.  When I asked them what they thought it was, or if they had ever seen one before I got answers like "it's this thing that you put in an old-school DVD player."  I quickly sent a post-it to the Media Center to see if they still had a record player, AND THEY DID!!  We plugged it up, slapped that record down, and you wouldn't believe how silent it was as I set it up.  We listened to the story, and had to flip the record over halfway through, they were so amazed!!

Here are a few pics I snapped with my phone, it was so cute to see them all huddled around watching the record spin!

Happy Friday!
Only 23 more days to go here in Georgia!!

Hip, Hip Hooray, Today Was the 100th Day!

We're over the hump!

My kiddos were greeted by this door this morning

 

Their desks looked like this

one swiss cake roll{plus}two chocolate frosted donuts{equals}100th day treat!!

The classrooms on my side of the hall all had the kiddos create a 100th day project (let me know if you'd like the letter we sent home, I have it in English and Spanish!).  After the kinders paraded through the school, we opened our doors (and the connecting doors) and had a little gallery walk to check out all of the awesome "hundredness."  Here are some highlights (from all four classes):

 

 I brought my lunch today, but I just had to snap a pic of our salad today... hahah!!

 How awesome is this?  a) the shadow, b) graveyard, c) headstone, and d) grieving sister.  There was a trend in my room of dead portraits at 100 years old, but this one took the cake!

  

(thanks Mrs. Bainbridge!!)

How do you celebrate the 100th day??

I Have a Dreamcatcher...

One of my sweet friends did this activity a few years ago, and I just had to replicate it for my students this year!  I've got pictures to share, but first I'm going to tell you how it went down.  I started the lesson by showing the kiddos a dreamcatcher (that I found at dollar tree) and asking them to talk to a friend about it (have they seen one before, do they know what it's called, what it's for, etc.).  I then read them "The Legend of the Dreamcatcher" which I found online and typed up.  I then showed them the "Bad Dreams/Good Dreams" t-chart and asked them to listen for words for each while I read "A Picture Book of Martin Luther King, Jr." by David A. Adler.  Afterwards, we recorded the bad things from MLK, Jr's life (segregation, violence, hate, bombings of houses) and the good things (equality, peace, Nobel Peace Prize, love) on our chart.  I gave each student a paper plate that I had cut the middle out of and had them punch 9 holes around the middle, and 3 holes on the bottom (they did this in the morning, before announcements).  I let each student pick their yarn color, beads, and feathers.  I showed them how to get started, and then they watched me make a dreamcatcher.  Some of them got frustrated, they had a hard time "staying in the middle," they wanted to take the yarn around the outside of their plate.  Once their dreamcatchers were finished, they wrote two "bad dreams" and two "good dreams" on the part of the paper plate that I had cut out (but you could use regular copy paper).  They cut out the dreams and then glued them to the dreamcatcher.  The "bad dreams" are caught in the web, waiting to be burned by Grandfather Sun's morning rays, and the "good dreams" are turned into dew and are sliding down the feathers to return to the Earth.  This took a reeeeealllly long time to complete, but it was worth it, the kiddos have a deeper understanding of the "I Have a Dream" speech, as well as MLK, Jr's life.  Now, pictures!!

A Toast to the New Year!

So the kiddos came back today, and my goodness were they quiet for most of the morning (I think they were probably still asleep!)!!

My ESOL teacher/CQI partner and I are so on the same wavelength it's scary!  She emailed me yesterday afternoon asking if she could have this morning for a whole group lesson on resolutions (like I would say no!).  Turns out she had picked the same book that I had for today's activities!  She read Squirrel's New Year's Resolution to them, and then had them define "resolution" and brainstorm their own New Year's Resolution.  Cut to the block of time after our first Media Center visit of the year (where they were reminded to be choosing AR books for checkout) where we used the resolution draft to create these Ms. Durning-inspired "toasts" (I saw this post last year and bookmarked it for just this occasion... oh the days before pinterest...).  I put them on our door while the kiddos rocked out to Cara's amazing NYE freebie!  I printed this up yesterday, laminated it, and cut it out while watching winter premieres last night.  I set them up as a rotation at each table group and let the kiddos get to work, rotating freely between them.  They did an AMAZING job!  Not everyone had time to get to all of them, so we'll finish them up tomorrow.  (I'll try to remember to take my camera to school)

Oh, and I got a new student today, he seems super with it, and has the most gorgeous handwriting I've ever seen for a 7 year-old boy!  My sweetie who has my telephone number had his parent send a text today saying that "he says hi and he misses his classmates."  AND I got news that one of my girls was involved in a motorcycle (it had three wheels, not sure if it was a kid-sized or adult-sized one) accident over the break and was in the hospital for five days after fracturing part of her face.  I want more details, but this was all I could gather in the two minutes that I had to be in the front office picking up my new kiddo.  It warms my heart to know that she really wanted to come to school today, but couldn't, so she sent mom in to pick up her homework for the week (omg, precious!).

So without further ado, here are our "Toasts to the New Year!"  I just printed a picture from this site and traced the bread onto manilla cardstock and then cut 2x2" squares using the paper cutter.  The kiddos used a brown crayon to "toast" their bread and then wrote their resolution (from this morning, we checked it for correct spelling and grammar) on the pat of butter!  (ps how hilarious are the 'toast-its' for sticky notes??)

 Alex says he will help people ride bikes and learn tricks.

Gaby says "I will help my brother write his name."  He'll be in kindergarten next year!

Sorry for the iPhone pics... I left my big guy at home today.  If you went back with kiddos today, how was your day??

Avast! Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Ahoy ye landlubbers!  T'day we be celebratin' International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  We started out t'day by readin' "Jolly Roger and t' Pirates o' Captain Abdul" and then jumped starboard into Babblin' Abby's "Pirate Mark" unit. T' sprogs were shocked when Pirate Bert burst into t' classroom t' read them "How I Became a Pirate" and answer questions all about pirates and "how come he has a watch?" 

One skeptical "tiny teacher" said that "he must be real, 'cause Miss Dennis wouldn't invite a fake pirate to our classroom on Talk Like a Pirate Day" (love it!).

after we put "Pirate Mark" in our poetry notebooks, we added this little handprint swashbuckler to the left page!

Pirate Bert giving t' sprogs a chance to vote.

I love how they're so enthralled by him.  Little miss in the front couldn't contain herself!  ps: pay no attention to the fact that I haven't changed my calendar pieces yet... just got a mimio so I'm in the process of moving calendar to the whiteboard!