Summer Lovin'

had me a blast.  Unfortunately thats over, and now I'm in school mode.  School mode consists of going to bed between 9:30 and 10, getting up at 5:15 and generally being too tired to do anything else.  It also means that there may be a tiny little bit of teacher talk showing up on this blog, so if that is completely uninteresting to you, don't bother reading this post.  This is what my classroom looked like when I walked in on Aug 10th.

What a MESS!  As you can see, I have a huge classroom which is kind of a blessing and a curse.  These pictures were taken as I'm standing on a ladder trying to figure out what to do with my fabric panels (which line one wall) that they had come in over the summer and painted baby poo brown.  It was awful. There was no way I could look at that mess all year, so my assistant and I spent 3 days covering the panels with fabric and then hanging them all back up.  After two weeks of work it now looks like this...

This was as close to the same view as I could get without standing on a ladder.

This is the view if you stand in the back of my classroom and look in.

Reading/writing center.  Someone donated this great pop up tent.  I think its supposed to be one of those ball things but I am using it for a reading nook.

Woodworking center.

toys and games area

Kitchen...everyone's favorite center of course and yes, I painted that house on the wall myself.  I never claimed to be an artist so please don't judge me.

My fabric wall panels and my birthday board.  Our school has a bee theme so I made a beehive for each month and put a little black bee next to their name and birthday.

My new place to hang student work (inspired by Pinterest!) I hotglued clothespins to my new fabric panels and hotglued some ribbon and bee foam stickers I got at Michael's onto the top.  Michael's gives 15% off to teachers all the time which is awesome.  As for the fabric panels and clothespins, I am pretty much an expert at ghetto sewing.  Ghetto sewing = the use of hotglue, staples, velcro etc. in lieu of needles and thread.  All of my curtains in my room I made this way too.  I'm thinking of trying it out on the house sometime ;)    

A place for everything and everything in its place.  That should last for about 5 minutes!  Today was the first day with all of the kids at the same time and so far it seems like they are a pretty good group.  It is crazy starting from scratch...you forget how little they are in the beginning.  Today we worked on sitting on our bottoms.  And that's pretty much it.  For an entire day.  And we'll probably be working on it all day tomorrow too.  

This is my new behavior chart (also inspired by Pinterest!)  They are going to be "building rainbows" so everytime they do something good (i.e. sit down for 16 seconds) they get to add the next color.  When they get all the colors they can choose something out of the treasure box.  There are also gray clouds with sad faces on them to be used if necessary.  Cloudy day for you=no treasure box.  We'll see if it works!