Promethean Board!!

This past school year my school had a fundraiser to raise money to buy interactive white boards for our school. The plan was to buy them for 3rd and 4th grades, and then as more money came in move down. So that meant that Kindergarten would be last :(

Luckily, to help raise even more money, they made it into a contest. Whichever class raised the most money would get the first board. I had a SmartBoard at my previous school, so I knew how awesome they were. I wanted that board. I was getting that board. And then I turned into a fundraising monster.

My room mom and I went crazy!! Bake sale, penny drive, you name it! We kept going and going, even when other classes would start to get close to us in funds. In the end, I'm proud to say that my kids (yes- my kids really did most of the work) raised over $1100!!

And look what was just posed on Facebook:

I feel like Jesse Spano singing "I'm so excited! I'm so excited!" Now I really can't wait to get into my room and get ready for the new school year. It's going to be awesome!!

TpT FREEBIE!

I know most of us are in the middle of summer (some blogger friends just started summer, craziness!) but I'm already planning to go back to school at the end of July. You read that right, JULY. Technically students don't start until August 1, but teachers report back much sooner. So I better get ready!

I just made these cute dismissal tags to use with my students this year. My plan is to print and laminate them, then punch holes and attach to their backpacks with zip ties. I think it will definitely help in the beginning of the year with the dismissal chaos. I will probably also put a label on the back side with the student's name and my name. That way if a child gets separated from the "herd" during dismissal, another teacher can easily identify them and help get them to the right place. Goal for the 1st week of school? NO LOST KIDS! haha

Best part? I'm offering it you to FREE! Just go to my TpT website and download the file. Then print and use as necessary. While you're on TpT, be sure to check out my other products! 

**UPDATE- since this has become so popular (and my cute hubby isn't working so we need the money) I'm now selling this on TpT for just $1. Sorry y'all!! But it's still a great deal and super useful in the classroom. Also you can message me if you need custom tags made, and I'll put them up on TpT for you. Thanks!

Picture Labels!

Once again, I've neglected my blog. Things just got crazy and well, these days I'd rather spend time with my cute hubby than glue to my computer :) 

But, now it's summer and I have all the time in the world! And as crazy as it sounds, I'm already getting ready to go back to school. I'm working on a few things to add to my classroom, including these direction picture labels:

What do you think? I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and I think they will really help my students keep track of 3 and 4 step directions. Not to mention how much it will help if I have any EE (exceptional education) students in my room this year. You can grab your own set on my TpT site! 

Classroom tour!

I finally finished setting up my classroom! And not a minute too soon because I have to report tomorrow morning for inservice. What's that you say? It's still July? I know, but my district is moving towards year-round school. Kids report Aug. 1 :)

Here's what I saw when I first walked in the room:

Not as much cabinet space as I'm used to, but still a good amount:

 And as you can see, I had NO trouble filling it!

One of the best things is that there are 24 lockers in the room. There's no way I'll have that many students, so everyone will get a locker! It was rough having kids share last year. I decided to just number them rather than labeling with student names:

My book center all set up: (I need a lamp or something to go in the corner between the two shelves)

Another great thing, there's room for my rocking chair! I had to get rid of it last year to make room for my SmartBoard (first world problem).

My favorite part: the Word Wall! I spent about 45 minutes this morning measuring and spacing the grid out, including breaking out the level to make sure it was all straight! Pinterest was my inspiration :)

Tons of wall space means I have room to really display student's work. I went ahead and hung clothespins (covered in a cute crayon cut-out to match the theme, naturally). As students complete work and want to display it, I can just put it up on their pin!

These won't last long, but my kids last year had so much trouble with lining up, I felt like it was necessary!

A random corner that I'm not sure what I'll use for just yet. The trapezoid table will probably hold a center. The bookshelf has all of my reading/intervention materials.

My teacher corner:

Now all I need are my students! Meet the Teacher night is Monday night, and I can't wait!!

Center time!

A huge part of our day in my classroom revolves around centers. We do language centers, math centers and free choice centers just about every day. My language centers are the most organized, so I wanted to share with you how I do it.

Here's a pic of the set-up on my board:

Each center has a picture, so that the kids who aren't reading yet can still know where to go. I have a few centers that are kept in baskets that change some times, so those centers are just pictured with the color of the basket (blue crayon=blue basket). The kids names are next to what center they go to that day. Each morning I come in and take the picture at the bottom, move them all down and then the bottom goes to the top. Its so great because kids can just look and see where they're going, and I don't have to keep up with it!

Some of my centers that don't really change are: magnets, book center, computers, listening and puzzles. These stay the same, but the skill at each changes as the year goes on. For example, at the beginning of the year at magnets students are working on building their names and matching letters. The middle of the year they're making sight words. And now at the end of the year they're creating whole sentences. I love seeing the progress!

This is a system I will definitely take with me to my new job. Can't wait to see what that classroom looks like!

(note- I just had my evaluation meeting and my principal noted how she loved this organization system I have going! yay!)

Bloom's Taxonomy

If you're not in the education world, you may not be super familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy. I know what it is, I understand it, and yet I have a hard time explaining it to others (which the teacher in me tells me that means I don't really understand it, but I really think I do). As such, here's a brief explanation:

It refers to a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). Bloom's Taxonomy divides educational objectives into three "domains": Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart anddoing/hands respectively). Within the domains, learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels.^[4] A goal of Bloom's Taxonomy is to motivate educators to focus on all three domains, creating a more holistic form of education.^[1]

While on Pinterest over the winter break, I found a link to this poster:

How awesome?!? One of my teaching goals is to have better questioning, i.e. more "higher order" questions and less memory and recall. I've already emailed a PDF of this poster to the curriculum instructor at my school since she has access to a poster maker. I can't wait to get it blown-up into a poster size and put it up in my room! Hopefully it will remind me of my goal and get me thinking of some better questions (and hopefully those come while I'm being observed so I can get a good grade! lol).

**if you click on the picture, it will take you to the original link. There is also another super cute butterfly Bloom's poster that I think might be even better for Kindergarten, because it's very simple. I'll probably eventually put that one up in my room too :)

Kitchen update!

A few weeks ago, I blogged about making curtains for my Home Living center in my classroom. Well, I finished them and was so excited to hang them up! They turned out so cute. I inherited some dress up clothes, so I hot-glued some clips to the wall and added them to the center.

What do you think?

The kids keep asking me when Home Living will be "open." But then one of them reminds the others that they haven't learned the rules yet. Once we go over the rules, procedures, where things go, etc. the kids will get to visit this center. Can't wait to see what they make me! (that's their favorite thing- making me food)

Back to School!

Hello everyone! Well, we are officially back to school and the year has already taken off. Today was a half day (just for Kindergarten, everyone else had a full day!) but tomorrow we'll be jumping into the deep end. My classroom is all set up, thanks in large part to some awesome friends. I love how it is set up this year and the kids seem to like it too. Here's what I have going on:

our "policeman" to control the noise level:

calendar/circle time area. The books in the basket will change with the season/unit. Right now it has all my back-t0-school favorites.

Here's bookshelf #1:

And bookshelf #2. The books are labeled and organized according to author/type. It was a TON of work, but totally worth it.

And because I haven't taught the kids how to "use" these bookshelves yet, here's what they look like right now:
.Once they learn the rules, how to put the books away, etc. they'll get to "unwrap" the bookshelves. Until then, they are "under construction."

Have you started back to school? How did it go?

Books, books, everywhere!

**this is a guest post I wrote a few weeks ago and just realized I never published it here!

Hello everyone! This is Clare from A Day in the Life. For my guest post I wanted to share with you how I organize my classroom library. Even though it's only my 3rd year teaching (is that all? feels like much longer!), I have a TON of books! I've been collecting them for years- picking them up at garage sales, rummage sales, used books from the library, etc. And for the past 2 years that hasn't really been any rhyme or reason as to how they were organized. They were just flung on a shelf and I had to sift through them all when I needed a certain book.

At the end of last school year, my long term sub (I was out on medical leave) packed up my ENTIRE classroom. So when I opened all the boxes with books and saw they were all jumbled up, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to reorganize. Here's what I came up with!

These 4 tubs have my science/social studies books for our four "modules"- Community Helpers, World Cultures (USA for my class), Weather/Seasons and Animals.

This is a bookshelf I got last year through Donor's Choose. It's hard to see the labels, but the books are all sorted into categories: rhyming books, math books, ABC books, various Lang. Arts books, school books, books about feelings, and fairy tales/fables.

And here's my last bookshelf! It has all my author tubs as well as other categories.

Here's a close up of the labels I made. You can find some of them HERE on my Google Docs. Sorry I don't have them all to share, I can't find the other file (I made some 2 years ago and I guess I didn't save that file!).

The first day of school, the kids won't be able to see any of the books. The shelves will be "wrapped" in butcher paper, and as we learn classroom rules and procedures they'll gain book privileges. Last year I had to limit their access because they kept putting the books back in the wrong place, but I think this year with plenty of practice it'll work great!

Looking forward to a great school year and no more searching for lost books!!

Moving Day!

This past week I got the go ahead to get back into my classroom. Yay! Except that everything got packed up at the end of the year so when I walked in I saw this:

And this:

And this:
It's kind of hard to unpack boxes when all the shelves are either stacked on the lockers or the window sill! Or crammed into the bathroom! yikes.

Thankfully our awesome custodian was super nice and got them down for me, so I was able to make some progress. I still have a LONG way to go before school starts, but it is making me excited for the school year.

Since they all got jumbled up, I decided now was a good time to organize my books:

In the past I haven't really had a very good system, so I'm working on it. It'll be nice to have books sorted by category: math, rhyming, ABC books, school books, etc. I'll show you the final product, but here's what I have so far:
Now all I need are some students!

*** please excuse the quality of these photos, they were taken on my phone!