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! 

First Monday Made It and a Give-away!

I'm linking up with Tara from 4th Grade Frolics this week for my first ever Monday Made It! It's been really difficult for me to plan for my classroom when I don't have a position yet. I will only find out at the very earliest on the 19th of August. Since I could be teaching anything from K to 6, I've been making things that can be used at many different grade levels.

My first Made It is the design for my new blog. I used digital scrapbook paper and elements to create the design. I'm still in the process of figuring out how to add more links and gadgets to it.

My second Made It came after I visited Michael's to find some kind of earring holder. I didn't love the ones they had for sale, but ended up finding a black frame in the clearance section for $3! I figured that I could attach some wire and it would hold all of my earrings for me.

If you'd like to make your own, you'll need to screw in little eye screws (screws with a ring at the end) on either side and thread some picture hanging wire through them. You could then just hang it on your wall, but I wanted a background image, so I glued a piece of scrapbook paper to cardboard and stapled it to the back of the frame. Now it's a lot easier to find and put back my earrings!

My third Made It is the clip art that I've been working on this week. I started making some clip art kids on Photoshop to use in my documents (when I find out what grade I'm teaching). I put up a birthday themed freebie on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you'd like a copy, just click on the image below. 

In honour of my first Monday Made It, I'm having a give-away. Just fill out the Rafflecopter below. The winner will win one of my clipart packs of their choosing and will receive the colour version and the black and white version. All you need to do is follow my blog. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I'm currently making a set to use in class schedules and subject bins. I'm just missing a few more subjects before I post them. 

Hopefully, by next week, I'll know which school/class/grade level I will be teaching so that I can post some classroom Made Its!

2013-2014 Classroom Tour

There are still a few more weeks of summer left until I find out where / what grade level I will be teaching. It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't coordinate anything over the summer or plan much.

Anyway, until then, I might as well share what my first classroom looked like. When I got to my room, it looked pretty bare. I had quite the fresh start because the classroom had been completely emptied. Don't be fooled by the full shelves. They belonged to the previous teacher.

On the bright side, I had a pretty big room with lots of tables! Now, on to the after photos! You'll have to ignore the blue "border" on some of them... my iPad case tends to be a bit photogenic. 

I covered all of the bulletin boards in fabric and it completely transformed the room.

You can see the classroom library, Six Traits wall and a bit of the computer station behind it.

Another view of the library.

 I ended up moving the word wall to above the windows because of a lack of wall space and because the kids weren't using it... I'll explain in another post what I used instead for those kids.

 You can see a bit of the Daily 5 stations that I had set up here. Since I only had 14 students, I actually had enough space for all of them to sit at a table instead of their desk. They loved being able to choose a better seat for themselves. It was also necessary because I taught Math to a group of 20 students.

Well, that's it for last year's class. Hopefully, I will have my own classroom next year and be able to organize, decorate and label everything! 

First Post!

This is my first venture into a teaching blog, so let's see how it goes. I just finished my first year teaching in a Grade 3/4 class and loved it. If I wasn't so overwhelmed and busy, I would have started this last year. BUT that isn't the case, so here I am. Get ready for lots of colourful, crazily organized chaos!