As we get our year started, we JUST started yesterday September 1st; this month’s theme here at Our Elementary Lives is our classrooms. So, all of us will be blogging about our very own, special classrooms.
I’m going to start this month off with my FIRST GRADE BUSY BEE classroom. I’m gonna be honest, this is a #reallifeclassroom right here! I didn’t clean it up to look perfect for all of the pictures, I have a theme, Bees-and have had it since being in the classroom, AND it’s probably not teacher publication worthy, BUT I love it.
Here is a picture from the door. This was taken right before Back to School Night so you can see the tables are full of information and goodies for my firsties. I have a HUGE window right by my desk which I love. I made and put up bee curtains (which are fireproof sprayed, don’t worry) that just make me smile every time I come into the classroom.
You can see that our rooms aren’t very big, which is fine. It’s bigger than the 10×10 room I had once as a classroom teacher, so I’ll take it.
Here’s a look from over by my desk. You can see my library and sink in the back corner. That yellow bulletin board is kind of a hodge-podge of things. It houses are months and days of the week posters, our behavior system (I use a strike system-like baseball, 1-2-3) and the paper trays for our writing center. I also put up our writing anchor charts up there too.
This is the back of the room. I typically only have 4 kids tables because I’ve only ever had 16 students, but this year I have 18, so I needed to add a table. I’m not sure I like it butted up against the other table, but it will work for now. I’m hoping to get some flower, octagonal tables with a Donor’s Choose, but I haven’t created the project yet.
About our small class sizes: we are a SAGE (student achievement guarantee in education), now called AGR (achievement gap reduction) school. This means we get state funding because we are a low-income school. This means we have to keep our class sizes small with no more than an 18:1 student to teacher ratio in kindergarten through third grades. It’s awesome and gives kids the small class size, individual attention they need.
Here’s my word wall and small group tables along with my beloved easel. You can see my ABCs above the word wall. We use Handwriting Without Tears so I don’t have a cute one-just the one provided. By the end of the year, that word wall will be loaded with so many sight words. Under the word wall are my math cubbies. They house all of our math manipulatives and make them easy access for the kids to use whenever they need them.
Here’s my messy #reallifeclassroom desk. It’s always a mess, even though I’m a super organized person. If it’s a school day, it has stuff all over it. Also can you see my bee and flowers on my window. LOVE THEM!
Here is our carpet and smart board area. I don’t have a cutesy rug (not because I don’t want one), these were provided by our school because we just got tile last year and I haven’t invested in finding a different one yet. To the left is my daily schedule (blue pocket chart) and to the right is my whole class incentive beehive. Our classroom seasonal/anchor bookshelf is by our smart board as well as our Busy Bee Helpers.
And lastly here is my classroom library. It’s the only thing I really took a close up of because it is my work-in-progress, always changing, favorite thing in my classroom. I have worked really hard on getting it to be how I like it. On the top shelf in the big red and blue bins are my leveled library based on text bands and reading levels. These mostly have fiction readers. Below that, in the other slots, are my genre and theme baskets. These include poetry, nonfiction animals, fairy tales, weather, space, class made books, etc. Isn’t my shelf awesome? It was in my very first classroom at this school and it has followed me around to all the other rooms I have been in. My Dollar Store baskets fit perfectly in it and I love how it works for my library. All the papers on the white board are the sign ups for Back to School Night (volunteers, fall conferences, holiday parties, etc.)
