Classroom Tour 2015-2016

Welcome to the jungle...!



Over the summer, I found out that I would be teaching a special class for students with behavioural (and academic) difficulties. Once I knew this, I immediately got into planning mode. My first concern was that I knew they would be installing prison-like bars on the windows for safety reasons (to avoid kids jumping out). I wanted to make the windows into a statement piece since we have a full wall of windows in our school. It was then that I came up with the idea of having a jungle theme.

My original idea involved cutting out animal silhouettes and installing them on the windows above the bars. Since it would be a Grade 3/4 class, I didn't want to use a cutesy animal theme, so I opted for something a little bit more mature. I spent an evening looking up photos, drawing and cutting out all of the silhouettes. When I brought them to school, I ended up changing my mind because I knew they would get ruined by the ice on the windows in the winter. By putting up cellophane paper on the windows, I would be able to keep my animals up all year!

You can't see it all that well, but the windows cast green and blue reflections on the floor. It's very peaceful and doubles as blinds. Most importantly, the kids don't notice the bars as much and it doesn't feel like a prison room. They've only been in school for 2.5 days, but so far none of them have made a comment about the bars! Success!

My desk is hidden behind a tv unit and a filing cabinet...but it isn't organized to my liking yet, so it will stay hidden from pictures! I have a standing table at the back of the classroom for the kids to work at, but so far, they haven't quite mastered the art of standing to work.

I was very happy to be able to reuse my navy and green fabric this year! I was able to add two black bean bag chairs to the room (they are coveted spots). The pillows in my "Relaxation City" (calm down corner named by the kids) were $2.50 each at Ikea! The kids love taking them out to work on the floor with a clipboard. The shelves that they are on were originally brown and red, but there was no way they were staying that way in my room.

They look much better in navy! It's actually a lot darker in person.

Here is my makeshift guided table, teacher shelf (the red will be covered eventually) and ELA wall. I'm excited to be starting a CRAFT wall for the first time this year! Don't ask about the green table legs... I tried it out and am changing it back.

Here's the view from the front of the class. Our fidgets, headphones and weighted animal are on the small shelf in the front of the room. We also have a DeskCycle at the front of the class for the kids to pedal under their desk!

Last, but not least, here's the computer station and unfinished work pockets. 

Annnnnnd, just for fun, here's a before picture (with navy fabric in the process of being put up)

I hope you enjoyed my classroom tour! I will try to post more this year about the challenges and adventures of teaching this class.

2015 Classroom Sneak Peek

It would seem that I am horrible at blogging during the school year. I will try my hardest to keep it up this school year! I've been really busy this week trying to get my classroom set up (teachers officially go back next week and the school has only been open since the middle of last week). I'll show you my classroom reveal in the next couple of weeks. For now, here's a sneak peek!

Any guesses on what my theme is?

Fall Artwork

When I found out that my class had no idea about primary, secondary, or complementary colours, I knew that our next Art lesson had to go back to the basics. We looked at the work of Michael Strouth, who uses complementary colours (mostly blue and orange) to create colourful landscapes. Below is an example of one of his pieces.

They had to use complementary colours in their landscape and draw a pattern on each mountain or section of grass that they drew. These could be stripes, dots, pumpkins, blades of grass, etc. They used vibrant colours of pastels to make their landscape. When they were finished, they outlined everything with black pencil crayon to make the colours and patterns more defined.

Now they brighten up the corridor above where the students hang their coats.

I accidentally discovered that the window frames were magnetic. Putting up art will be so much easier now! Their artwork won't fly off when the annoying sticky tack becomes unstuck and I can easily put up new art and change the artist tags because they are also magnetic! : ) Happy teacher, happy students. What more can you ask for?

Flower Pencils

( I feel bad for neglecting my blog, but I've been so busy with my students this year that I haven't had time! More posts are coming though!)

This post should really be titled 'How I lent my students pencils without them losing any all year!'

Last year, I decided that I wasn't going to keep handing out pencils to students who had forgotten them or lost them ... etc. I teach Language Arts to two groups in my room, so with the rotations, I often end up with students who forget their supplies in class. They can't easily go get them because there is another class in their room. The perfect solution was flower pencils.

When a student doesn't have a pencil, they can go grab a flower pencil from my desk and borrow it for the period. When they are done with it, it goes back in the flower 'vase'. I've never had a student leave with one because they are so bright and don't easily fit in their pencil case. As proof, here are my flower pencils from last year after being used for the whole year.

If you'd like to make your own set, just head on over to the dollar store, pick up some flowers and green tape. Once you take apart the flowers, just poke the sharp end of the pencil into the different pieces and then tape right under the leaves or flowers. The tape and the metal on the top of the pencils keeps the flowers in place. Finally, place them in a cup or flower pot and enjoy! It will brighten up your room and prevent your students from accidentally borrowing your pencils and then losing them.. .

Classroom Reveal 2014-15

After a long week of working in my classroom, it's finally done! Well.. done enough for the first day of school that is. I can't wait for my students to see the classroom they will spend their last year of elementary school in!

Here's what the room looked like on August 20th:

I kept this picture large so you could see the pipe and outlet that somebody thought would fit perfectly on a bulletin board... I was very, very annoyed when I saw that. 

As usual, it looked pretty bland, but the room was pretty big with lots of room for storage. Anyway, here's what I did with the room last week:

Our school theme for the year is science, so of course, my door had to be science themed! I covered it in navy blue fabric because it was horrible and grey with paint chipping off everywhere. Fortunately, the other side is a lovely blue freshly painted over the summer!

Here is what my students will see on Tuesday morning when they walk in the room.

I made the two milk crate benches a few weeks ago with lots of help from my dad. They just so happened to match perfectly with the colours in my classroom! To make it even more of a perfect match, I made sure to put the green textbooks in the green bench and the blue textbooks in the blue bench. Call me crazy, but I love organizing things by colour. 

I would love it if I could put a rug in the reading nook, but our school board doesn't allow us to have rugs, pets or plants in our rooms due to allergies. I didn't let that stop me from using mats and fake plants! : )

I have most of my smaller math games on this back shelf, along with a few tools that my students may need to solve problems.

The green pockets on the wall are made with sheet protectors and construction paper. I will use them to display the students' work all year. It will be less bright when they have writing pieces in them because the green will only be a small border around their work.

What's that you ask? Where is that ugly pipe? I managed to camouflage it with white and black duct tape. It's also partially hidden behind the computer monitors, so I'm pretty happy about that.

If you're looking at their desks and wondering, I like to stick baskets on them because otherwise, they are constantly looking for a pencil (especially with these desks!) I'm not a huge fan of the tennis balls, but I guess they will make it quieter.

Here's the front of the class, where my beautiful whiteboard and SmartBoard meet : ). Can you tell that I'm ecstatic about having a SB in my class?! I also found out that the chalkboard to the right of my SB is not magnetic.. What is the point of a chalkboard if you can't stick magnets to it!? I had pretty good timing though, because I asked the caretakers if there were any extra whiteboards a few minutes after the teacher down the hall got rid of one. It was on a big, bulky stand, but they took it off and screwed it to the useless chalkboard. Now, I have the perfect spot to write homework and to write our morning math problems!

Finally, I'll show you my almost completed teacher's corner.

I finally got the courage this year to laminate my interactive synonym poster. It made it through being laminated twice and attacked with an exact-o knife!

I was contemplating whether or not I should share this photo because it shows how unorganized my bookshelf is. It's sorted enough to be easy to use, so that's okay with me for a few weeks. Soon enough, I will tackle it and be able to sleep at night : P .

Well, that's the end of my classroom tour. I hope my sixth graders will like it!

If you made it all the way to the bottom, congrats!

Sneak Peek

I know that most of you have already welcomed your students into your classroom, but here, our students only go back after Labor Day. This past week has been crazy for me and I've pretty much been in my room every single day since I found out my assignment. Drum roll please...

I will be teaching Grade 6 at the same school as last year! I'm really excited to teach Grade 6 because it will be something new for me. It's great because I know the staff and students, but not so great because I just emptied everything from my last room in June just to bring it all back in August. Oh well, I guess lifting boxes and furniture upstairs counts as exercise.

My school is currently under lots of construction (which will hopefully be mostly finished by the time the students arrive). My classroom has a wonderful view of the construction workers working on building new walls. Anyway, enough about construction... on to the pictures!

This is not a classroom tour yet because it's not finished, but I'll give you a sneak peek. I'll post more detailed pictures this weekend when it will all be done (or as done as you can get in 4 days).


This is what my students will see when they walk in the door on the first day! Please ignore the mess on my desk. It will be the last thing I set up.

This side of the room is slightly less colourful and slightly less completed... but that's where I'm starting tomorrow! Wish me luck!

Revising and Editing With the Six Traits

Last year, I had a bunch of third and fourth graders who absolutely loved writing. The problem was that they were skipping steps in the writing process and completely forgetting about revising and editing. They were very quick to point out that they had indeed revised and edited because they had looked up those two words in the dictionary...

It was then that I decided to introduce a new revising and editing strategy. Since they were familiar with the Six Traits, I wanted to use those in the new strategy.

I went out and bought a bunch of different coloured pens. They had to be green, blue and purple to match the VOICES wall in the classroom (there's a reason for my colour-matching madness, I swear!)

So the next time they were writing, I introduced the brand new revising and editing pens. Here's what they had to do:

1. Use the purple pens to check for sentence fluency. Underline the first word of every sentence. They had to change some of the words if they started many sentences the same way. Some of them even started a tally on the bottom of their page : ).

2. Use the blue pens to check their word choice. This was where they would cross out many of their constant 'said's and use the thesaurus to help them out. They could also use the blue pen to use figurative language and add descriptive details.

3. FINALLY, they could pull out their beloved dictionary and look up the words they didn't know and write them in green.

This made my life so much easier because I could just glance at a student's work and know if they had revised and edited their work. It was also easier for them to remember the steps involved in the writing process. They knew that their page had to have all three different colours on it before they could move on to their final draft.

A quick glance at these two samples shows that both students have revised and edited their work.

The best part? If they forgot what to look for, they could take their writing and their coloured pen to the VOICES wall and read the statements for that trait! It was a check-list that they could walk up to any time. Please ignore the fact that the wall is in its early stages... I can't seem to find a more recent version of it. 

I hope you can use this strategy in your own classroom!