Summer Time Prep

So I looked at my sad blog and realized it has been a whole year since I last posted.   That might give you a little indication of what my school year was like - VERY CHALLENGING!!  Well now that my daughters graduation is over, graduation party is done, my nieces' wedding is done and the fourth of July is over - wow we have been busy- I am ready to start planning and preparing for the next school year.  Today I scrubbed my chair pockets and sent them through the wash,   Unbelievable how dirty they get!

Here they all are drying on my living room floor!

I love these handy chair pockets.  They are from School Specialty and well worth the money.  It keeps my kiddos daily folder and pencil pouch neatly tucked away until we need them.  This also keeps my tables clutter free.  I used to use table caddies and I just didn't like all of the supplies visible.  Not only did it look cluttered, I would find that it was a distraction for some.  While I am explaining a lesson, etc. some of them just couldn't help themselves and would start to play with their supplies - drove me CRAZY!!

So now that I have clean pocket charts for the upcoming school year my next project is to make a new "fake" cake for birthday celebrations.  Sadly I had to throw away my old one.  After 6 years of use it just fell apart.  I will post pics of my new cake as soon as I get it done!!

How are you preparing and planning for the upcoming school year?

Classroom Tour

Just sharing a few ideas that I use for classroom organization and management.  These pictures were lost on my memory card in my camera, thus the reason for posting classroom tour pictures so late :-)

This is my classroom door and entry way.  We are required to post our focus for learning so that whoever enters our room will know what skills, standards, etc. we are working on. We are also required to post times for our reading, math and writer's workshop block times.  These are absolute and uninterrupted times!

We read our daily schedule everyday. Yellow for our morning (up to lunch) and blue for our afternoon.  It is amazing to see the students look at the schedule to see what is up next.  Heaven forbid if I forget to change it and I have the wrong special up for the day.  My students also read our daily schedule during read the room.

This is our writing wall

This is how I manage my helpers for the day.  I have one boy and one girl.  They are the "lucky ducks" for the day.  Line leaders, lunch count helpers, paper passers, etc.  They get to wear the lucky duck necklace for the day.  They all look forward to their day!

I have two of these cabinets, one for math tubs and one for abc tubs.  Although I like my cute little labels I made I am thinking of changing them to just have big numbers.  I have and am reading again (I don't think one every stops!) reading Debbie Diller's book Math Workstations.  I keep trying to improve my math and literacy workstation times!!!

My wonderful chart caddy!  We use these charts for reading during Literacy Workstation time

My New Painting Easel

My wonderful hubby woked so hard on this all summer for my classroom.  How awesome is my new painting easel.  I love it!  It is on wheels so I can push it out of the way easily and it has storage on all sides along with drying racks on all sides.