Summer Projects

I am very excited to be moving into our renovated building and my new classroom this fall. My elementary school has been two buildings for decades, and we are finally all going to be in one building. There will be many changes, new principal, some reduced staff because of double positions, new teammates. I was fortunate to be a third grade teacher with a last name starting near the beginning of the alphabet because I was assigned this room.

This space was once the health room and principal's office. We've had chances to go in and measure, and decide how we will fill the cabinets.

 

 
We've never had overhead cabinets, so that is somewhat exciting. The shelves are 12 inches deep, so I can't store the weekly posters for Treasures series up here. :(

 This is my only bookcase for the room, and it is a built in.

My SMART board will be mounted across from these cabinets, and in the back of the room under the whiteboard will be the computer stations. How many places do you see for a kidney table?

Before I used a light turquoise fadeless bulletin board cover with black and bright borders. Now that the floor is a purple blue with yellow and orange accents, I decided to switch up colors. I found a very pale blue bulletin board cover and am still pinning possible borders.

 

My new theme is..... sunflowers and butterflies!

I made up labels for the inside?/outside? of the cabinets so I know what should be in there.

I purchased 3 bunches of artificial sunflowers to make fancy pens that will go in a flower pot for final drafts and decorate on top of the cabinets. I also printed out pictures and placed them in matching frames. I am still considering if I want to paint the frames white.

 

To keep myself organized, I made labels and file folders for Common Core ELA, something we didn't spend much time on this year. We did a huge common core fraction unit and I have math resources labeled and ready, but language arts was in the back of my mind. I feel better and will share some links to materials I plan on using.

 

 

Kindergarten math

Near the end of the school year, a friend who is a TA in kindergarten was telling me that she wasn't so sure a small group was going to do so well with their upcoming assessment. They were having a hard time staying interested in their math group. So I made up some materials to help her practice counting to 5.

The 1-5 cards were for 1-1 correspondence, and the set cards were for identifying the correct number.

These cards were used to count items, and I spy ( I spy a card that shows 3 items and one of them is a tree)

Sorry this is upside down. I attached hippo heads to small socks and found the small foam balls at the Dollar Tree. Using a small shirt box, their hungry hippo hands "ate" a certain number of balls.

 

A little more engaging for tuned out little ones.