My Classroom

Welcome to my classroom!

As you can tell by both my blog name and by my classroom decor, I absolutely LOVE polka dots! I am excited to take you on a tour of my room!

First, we have my "I Can" statement board. I write all the "I Can" statements for the week on the board, and it helps me to remember to always go back to the standards and objectives. Next to the "I Can" statements I have our class schedule done in (you guessed it) polka dots! I also made these large flowers out of tissue paper! I loved how they turned out. I will show a tutorial on how to make these flowers on a blog post in the near future, so make sure to stay tuned!

This is our library board! You will notice as you go through the pictures that I decorate with polka dots and owls! The books featured on the board are some of our class favorites. I have our library books organized into baskets by genre or author.

This is our class job board! The rainbow pennants are available here in my TPT store! I have used them on several of my bulletin boards. I have the jobs typed on the rectangle labels, and then I hot glued a clothespin on a thumb tack. Each student has an owl with their name on it, and I use the clothespin to hold the owls. I love the globe lights around the bulletin board. When the students come in from being outside, I let them take a bit of a rest. I turn off the lights and plug in the globe lights. It makes for a very relaxing environment!

 This is my birthday board! I have this board available on TPT here. This is also where my computer center is. The painting in the background was our class painting that we auctioned off at our school's annual benefit!

Here is another view of our computer center. I love how large my windows are, but I felt like they needed a curtain of some kind. So, my mom and I made these cafe curtains in the bright colors I have all over the room.

This is doubles as both my small group table and my desk. One of my favorite projects in my classroom was my polka dot desk chair! A friend of mine was getting rid of this old office chair (it was in pretty rough shape), and I asked if I could have it. I got some great polka dot fabric from my local craft store, and I used a screw driver to push the fabric between the cushion and the plastic. I thought it turned out pretty cool!

This is a before and after picture of the chair!

 

This is my writing center desk. My room is really small, so I have to be pretty creative about where I put things. This desk has a chalk top, so the students can use chalk to write down ideas before they start working on writing a story, paragraph, etc. They love to use the chalk on the desk!

 

This is my word wall! I had originally used the black and white polka dot fabric (yes...fabric! The holes don't show when you remove previous work), but it made my eyes cross because this board goes all the way across one side of our room.

I had a parent who was kind enough to donate a fish tank and fish to our class. It is really therapeutic for the kids, and they love having a pet that they are responsible for.

 This is our math manipulative area. I try to keep the manipulatives in an area where the students can easily get to them.

This is my rocking chair! Some very sweet students gave me these super cute owls as gifts! I absolutely love them! I have some incredibly sweet kiddos!

This is one of my very favorite things in our classroom! We have a class stuffed animal named Wally. Each weekend, a student takes him home, and they post pictures in Wally's Adventure Journal (just a simple spiral notebook). This class has particularly become attached to Wally, and during a lesson on writing stories, the class asked if they could write a story about Wally. So, they wrote and illustrated this story, and I had it sent to Presto Photo. They sent us back this great hard cover book! I will treasure this story for a VERY long time!

 I use this apples to keep up with table points. Each apple correlates to a table (I have table colors). When the students at each table work together to get things cleaned up and put away, they can earn table points. At the end of the week, the table that has earned the most points gets to go to the treasure box. This has definitely been instrumental in helping us move quickly through transitions. These kids do not mess around when there are table points to be earned!

We are getting ready to begin to learn how to tell time, so these clock labels are crucial!

This is where I keep all my binders. I like using binders in order to organize all my reading units. We are currently using Reading Street, and I have organized these binders by unit. I also really like the chalkboard art quotes on either side (these quotes are by "Kid President").

This is our behavior clip chart. We are required to use this system at our school, but honestly, I absolutely love it. I like that students have the opportunity to correct their mistakes, and I like that it brings attention to good behavior. I have this behavior chart available on TPT, here.

This is our "Listening Center" table. I use an iPod to download all of our books! This was a plastic table from Lowe's! My husband sawed the legs down so that it was at the perfect height for my kinder kiddos, and then I covered it with the same black and white polka dot fabric that I covered the bulletin boards with! 

This is an example of what we do during interactive writing. The students come up with the sentence, and then the class and the teacher work together to write the sentence. I have gradually released more responsibility over to the students as the year has gone by. I remember how much help they needed when we started this in October. I had to help them spell quite a few words, and they needed a lot of reminders about punctuation and capitalization. I gave very little help on this sentence because the students are beginning to correct one another and use self-correction! I am so proud of them!

These are all the interactive writing papers that we have done throughout the year! I leave them all up because I like for the students to see their own improvement throughout the year!

This is my art wall! The kiddos love to draw pictures and write notes! This bulletin board stays very packed!

This is an overview of my classroom! Thank you for visiting! I will continue to add to this page!