Back to School Potpourri

WARNING: Today's post has no real theme-it's a mish-mash of things from my classroom from the past couple of weeks!

So, the school year is underway! Today marked day 16. I stand by what I said in my last post-I have a class full of sweeties this year! I am up to 21 precious firsties and they are all SO smart. I've only made one cry so far, so that's something, too!

One of the first things we did this year was read Pete the Cat books. My favorite is Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes. (Funny side story: Little Miss loves ALL of the Pete books. Over the summer she discovered them and now knows them by heart...she has to take them all to bed with her now EVERY NIGHT. It's hysterical.) We did this adorable activity from The Bubbly Blonde . They came out so cute! We talked about the ways that we can "rock" this school year and then I gave them the sentence frame "I can rock first grade by..." Here is what the outside of my door looks like now, all decorated for our first PTO meeting next week:

I just love all the bright colors and the polka dots!

Next thing: math fun...we've been working on graphing. Most of our activies have originated from my graphing packet that is available on TpT, but I tried something a little different this year to introduce tallies. My group this year saw tallies in kindergarten, but I wasn't sure how comfortable they were with MAKING sets of tallies. In my experience what kids like to do is make a row of five parallel lines and THEN cross the fifth...sigh. So, this year I tried out the popsicle stick method that I have seen all over Pinterest. To put it concisely...WOW! Here are some pics of my little mathematicians in action:

Aren't they awesome? I just used a tally practice page freebie I found on TpT in Ms. Scmidt's shop. The kids paired up with a math buddy (because I didn't have enough sticks for everyone to have their own set) and traded off counting out popsicle sticks to match the number and arranging the set into groups of five with leftovers. It was a lot of fun and I was able to see pretty quickly who understood the concept (but had trouble making tallies), who understood the concept and could make tally marks correctly, and who didn't get the concept at all.

One last thing...today was Friday and my precious room mother sent in snacks for the kiddos. Here is the extra one she told me to bring home for Little Miss:

Isn't that precious?! And the snack featured animal crackers and gummy worms. (She put the giraffe on it because the kiddos are Mrs. Goggans' Giraffes...every class in the school has a banner with an alliterative name and that was the cutest thing I could come up with. There's not many cutesy animals for the letter "G," believe it or not! "Mrs. Goggans' Geckos" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?! Haha!)

That's all for this week...next week we're going to dig deep into our weather standard and wrap up graphing before the LONG WEEKEND!

2014 Classroom Tour

Hello, little blog! It's been a long time! I warned you last summer that blogging would be pretty sporadic until grad school was over. Well, guess what?! I'm DONE with grad school! That feels so good to type. I had my exit interview last week and I passed (with honors!). I have to take the state assessment to add Reading to my teaching certificate, but I can officially say I have my M.Ed now. :)

So, since that year-and-a-half-long journey is over...I can now turn my attention to other things...like my blog! And TpT store! You can expect to see and hear a lot more from me now...

A few updates since I haven't blogged since DECEMBER (ugh). First of all...in addition to having a shiny new degree...I moved schools this year. It's a big change in neighborhoods and size, but I am in heaven. You guys...my new school is SO nice. It's a lot smaller than my old school, and everyone is just as helpful as can be. And the parents are amazing...PTO came by with cash envelopes for the teachers last week to purchase supplies. I feel like I've been transplanted to an alternative universe! I will still be teaching first grade, but I won't have inclusion this year and I am not the grade level chair. Whew! I'm not going to know what to do with all this free time!

Now for the fun part...my classroom tour! I had a great time decorating my new space.

This is the view of my board. Ignore my to-do list on the left hand side. We have to do a lunch count every morning at our school, so that's what the taped-off boxes in the middle are for. Eventually kids will move their magnets into their designated lunch choice as part of their morning routine.

The view from my guided reading table. I chose not to claim a teacher desk this year. There was an enormous one in the room when I arrived, but it was beat-up and took up a crazy amount of space. I don't know yet how I will like only having my teacher table, but we'll see!

The view of my Word Wall and the clocks from last year. I was sad to let my magnetic word wall go...it was pretty awesome...but I think I will like this set-up okay. Since the meeting area pretty much needed to be here in the classroom, I thought the benefit of having the Word Wall close by outweighed the nifty-ness of words on magnets.

 My entryway table...same baskets from last year, new spot. One box is for tardy slips, one for hall passes, one for notes from home, and a basket for nametags.

The back of my classroom library. One neat thing about this classroom is that has an adjoining door to the classroom next door. The teacher next door is also new to the building, so we LOVE that we can stick our heads in each other's room to ask questions! The teacher who had my room before me painted the back of this bookcase with magnetic paint. I like how it is arranged now, but I am considering flipping it around to use the backside for our CAFE strategies. I don't know...thoughts?

View of the sink and counter area. This was BEFORE the kids and their mountain of supplies arrived...now those blue baskets are full of sanitizer and the counter is covered in Kleenex and copy paper! (At this school, almost everybody brings in supplies. This is SUCH a change for me!)

The view from the door. I re-painted my rocking chair this summer to match my new color scheme. Well, to be completely honest...I SUPERVISED my husband painting this chair...which means I picked out the color and he volunteered to do it. He's a keeper!

 The classroom library. It's a work in progress. I have several hundred more books at home, but we are searching high and low for the shelf clips to hold those last 2 shelves. Turns out they are very hard to find! My custodian repurposed a few from an old bookshelf for more but we are still looking for a few more. I will probably have to get another piece of furniture for the rest of my books at some point. I'm thinking a long low shelf along the back side of the rug would be good. (That means a trip to IKEA, though!)

Here are my cute signs for Open House! Like the rest of the teaching universe I got them at Michael's (along with the bowls) and I found cutesy signs on Pinterest that I liked.

We had an awesome first day on Friday. (Yes, our district started CRAZY early this year!) I have 18 kids as of right now, which is such a change from the class of 27 I had last year. I hope that number doesn't increase too much! They are a sweet, sweet bunch. I am so excited about going back to work tomorrow! I hope all of you that are headed back this week have a great first week!