Orange Polka Dot Love

Many, many apologies, Blogging world! My absence has no excuse...except, wait...I redesigned my whole classroom.

I think I have mentioned before that we turn in our keys in June and don't get them back until the end of August. This means that all of the 150 hours I did over the summer for my class work was in no way actually about putting my room together.

It probably isn't an exaggeration to say that I spent like 120 hours in my room when I got my keys...

But it worked out! I did this:

I marked everything that was from Pinterest....There will be a whole tour of the room coming soon, but above is only pieces.

Over at Clutter-Free Classroom there is a wonderful post from the summertime that inspired classroom jealousy in my heart. Because of that post, I spent an entire eight hours stapling sheets to my walls! And man, oh, man...am I happy with my sheets! As you can see from the photo above, the sheets go precisely from ceiling to floor. Anyone who has their classroom in a portable understands how difficult (and annoying, and time-consuming, and patience testing...I could go on) it can be to "define" your bulletin board space. If anyone is as OCD as I am, then they likely have a leveling app on their phone or perhaps an actual level in their classroom handy to do boards....the sheets took all of that away!
Following her directions though, I did let the sheets go through the dryer first to get the wrinkles out. My sheets were so successful that they seem to have inspired sheet-usage in friends' classrooms :) To additional great successes!

At the moment, the front of my classroom is my favorite thing to look at! I borrowed the idea for a homework hotline (under the whiteboard) for this year. In the new world of Thirdgradia that I have entered, we collect homework most days. This is different from Second Grade Land where it was only on Fridays, so checking things in was not a difficult task. In order to keep up with the homework papers, I have the kids clip their work to their number on the ribbon (another OCD moment where a ruler and a level were involved), which allows me to immediately check and see who did their homework and who did not.

Note: If one of my lovelies did not turn in their homework, they take a little field trip to the back of my room and write to me why it isn't at school in my "No Homework Folder." I foresee this being a valuable asset at conferences next month.

I also am proud of my magnet board that I made by putting bulletin board paper over the ugly tealish-blue of my storage cabinet. This made a perfect wall for my job chart, since I made all of the pieces magnetic.

Finally, I am really proud of the common core C's up above the board. My wonderful coworker came up with the idea of listing out the over-arching concepts now (before we fully turn over to common core) to really ensure that we are leading our students to be communicators, critical thinkers, collaborators, and creators. Plus (even though you can't see from this picture), I found orange polka-dotted ribbons to use as boarders around the 4 C's! How could that ribbon not be purchased?

I will do detail pictures and a whole classroom tour next week, now that kiddos are coming in and getting settled.

After three days of school, I am so proud of my class that I am gushing about them all the time! This should be a wonderful year!

Oh, and a quick P.S.

If you're looking for a great blog to follow, check out my lovely friend over at Musings from the Foreign Teacher! An American teacher in England who is quite possibly the reason for my love of polka dots <3

Pinterest Addict

Alright, I'll admit it:

I'm addicted to teaching blogs and pinterest.

Big time.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a lot of rearranging that I would love to be doing in my classroom, but my keys are turned in and locked away. Sigh.

As I've mentioned a million times before, I love, love, love Ladybug's Teacher Files; however, she is on vacation right about now. Her trip is perfectly timed with my mental obsession about my classroom reorganization...and now I am pouring over the Clutter Free Classroom !

The post that is linked is what has inspired a whole lot of online shopping: using sheets as bulletin board backgrounds.

Genius.

Ages ago, a former teacher of mine recommended using fabric to cover boards. While I also agreed that this was a fantastic idea, my OCD kicked in and I could see crooked edges...which would drive me nuts. So, I just finished a date with AnnasLinens.com that resulted in three brown sheets (to match my dots on chocolate colors) for $20! I shall report the results once I have returned to the land of the classroom.

Otherwise, I just finished today's Pinterest project of the day, and it worked out perfectly! With that Pinterest obsession I mentioned, I've seen a whole lot of pins where cheap frames are used to display lesson objectives. Seemed easy enough!

Math Teacher Friend and I took a trip to the Dollar Tree and Michael's today to buy scrapbook paper and frames.

Michael's was having a 50% off sale on their scrapbook paper (plus the teacher discount), so I got very adorable paper to frame! (Sadly no polka dots, but awesome orange patterns.)

After dismantling the frame, I traced the cardboard insert so the size would be marked properly.

In order to have sharp lines, and create enough layers so things wouldn't slip around, I opted to fold along my pencil lines rather than cut. It worked out really well, since the $1 frames needed a little extra help to make everything fit nicely.

And look! Cute little dry erase board! Perfect for writing eye-catching lesson objectives on and sticking on the white board! I do anticipate using black markers when they're actually displayed; however, blue is all I had on me.

Now all that is left is to figure out a nice configuration and to get them onto the white board! I'm also tossing some pink and blue in with my orange this year (again, to match the dots and chocolate), so I made sure to make the "objectives" sign in a different color.

And again, I leave you with the tease of my interactive notebooking research. I've been in the trenches looking, but I have not yet convinced myself that I want to implement it into my math program. We shall see!

Four Day Weekend!

Time to celebrate the conclusion to a much-needed and very relaxing four-day weekend!

For the amount that I have thought about my next post, I do hope that it is not underwhelming. I sat down to write it a couple of times and then scrapped everything because I was utterly unsatisfied. Let's try again.

So here it is:
Angry Birds!



Context: I painted Angry Birds to go on my bulletin boards. One day we had a rainy day schedule. That is what I got.

What did I do when I got the call that I would have a job? I painted birds.





and pigs....



But in all of that, I was missing one wonderful and idea-creating thing: Pinterest.

I saw a picture on Pinterest last week that caused a very massive face-palm moment. One of those, why-in-the-world-did-I-not-think-of-that moments. We studied verbs ages ago, and they illustrated their verbs so very nicely....but nothing would have been so wonderful as this:



ANGRY VERBS! This will certainly have to be re-created as a review day and whatnot. Write a sentence using an amazing verb on your bird or pig. The kids seriously are obsessed with Angry Birds. All sorts of hats, clothes, valentines, toys, etc. They would eat up the idea of Angry Verbs....Plus, I have been trying to think of a good open house board configuration....since I am being lazy and leaving up my fun Ancestor Board all the way until then.....because it is cute and it took a lot of effort to get things in the right place....and I would rather just do surgery on the pieces that fall off than recreate the whole thing in May....look at me justifying my laziness.



Pinterest will ultimately be the death of me. I find myself perusing whenever I have time and there are far too many lesson ideas to fit into just one school year. In addition to that, there are far too many options of everything to fit into one lifetime.

In conclusion: Angry Birds.
The end.