A Look Inside My Classroom

I've taken some updated pictures of my classroom now that we are almost two months into the school year. I started the year with most of my bulletin boards blank so that my students and I could build up our learning materials together with charts and resources that will help them through out the year. Of course it's an ongoing thing and the boards will change as we learn and grow but here's what we have so far...

So these first three pictures are a little hard to see but I'll describe it to you. Each student created a name tag at the beginning of the school year and then I laminated them. I then punched a hole in each card and threaded two twisted pipe cleaners through the hole with a hook on one sad to keep it in the card and a note on the bottom.

Every time my student's finish a book they fill out a short bookmark telling me about their book and then they get to thread a bead on their card. When they reach a multiple of 10 they get an extra special star bead. I have set a goal of 40 books in my class this year after reading The Book Whisperer and doing the book study this summer...but many of my students are going to far surpass that. I think I need to talk to some students about choosing more challenging books! So when that happens I plan to get a third type of bead for the students who have gone beyond the goal.

This is the legend for my word wall. I like to integrate my subjects so this gets students using a legend all year long AND I can put all the words from the subject areas in one place!

Here is my word wall! The "Scrabble" style letters are clip art from Scrappin' Doodles. Love it!

Here is out updated Math board. At the start of the year when we were studying Data Management it had an oversize bar graph on it so we could reference the parts of a bar graph whenever we needed to. We have now moved on to number sense and numeration so the board shows place value information. Above the board you can see our Math Word Wall (which needs to be updated). I put any Math specific vocabulary there.

This is our Work on Writing area. You can see our anchor chart for the types of topics and forms we can write during Work on Writing time. We will continue to add to this chart throughout the year. Underneath you can see the options for what I expect students to do during Work on Writing.

And that's it for now....I plan to re-do my Social Studies board soon and we are starting a new unit on Non-Fiction Text Features and Inferring with Media so keep an eye out for new photos to come!

I would LOVE to hear your thoughts, suggestions or similar ideas. Please comment below, especially with links back to your own blog so I can visit you too!