Today was an exciting day for me. As you know, I am starting at a new school in September. Today I had the opportunity to go to school and check out and spend some time in my new classroom. Lucky for me, my best friend and fellow teacher Jenn came with me!
We had a nice little chat with my new principal, and she led us up to the third floor where my classroom is. The room is a GREAT space and the teacher I am taking over for left the room in great shape. Things are very organized and clearly labeled, and there is even a leveled library all ready to go! The classroom lends itself to creative bulletin boards, and is spacious enough for a meeting area, a teacher nook, a small group table, computer work areas, and the desks to be arranged in clusters. I can't wait to get back in there next month and start organizing it to make it my own.
I have been brainstorming ideas for the "theme" of my room the last few days. Being upper elementary, I know a lot of the cute themes from grades 1-2-3 are lost on fifth graders, but I still feel I need a cohesive theme for myself! Having seen an idea at PRES, I have considered making a "social network" theme in a future classroom. I feel my fifth graders might be perfect to try this out with! Jenn and I plopped ourselves down in the students desks and played around with different ideas for bulletin boards inside and outside the room. For our first go at it, we came up with some pretty good ideas! I will be posting pictures towards the middle/end of August when I start hanging and decorating!
Here are some shots of what the classroom looked like today:
Here is Jenn hard at work on our diagram, TO DO List, and theme brainstorming!
My "to do" list for now consists of some trips to Target, Container Store, and Lakeshore Learning. I am going to back my bulletin boards with black backing paper and accent them with neon colored borders. I am in need of backing paper, borders, cut-out letters, and lots and lots of labels. I am definitely also going to be hitting up TpT for a lot of organization templates and fun back to school documents. Any recommendations for stores and products, please comment below!
I am hoping to use this blog as a way to communicate with parents of the students in my class. I am hoping to blog every Thursday/Friday/[and/or]Saturday with what we've accomplished that week and what we have coming up the next week. If anyone out there reading this has any experience doing this, please let me know! I have toyed with the idea of doing a class newsletter, but I am much more comfortable blogging and think it has less of a chance of getting lost in little ones backpacks than a newsletter!
Touching on yesterday's blog post, my new school uses a teacher-generated ELA curriculum that follows a workshop model for reading and writing, and uses Envisions for math. I am excited to be using Envisions again, and happy I have experience with it. I am intrigued by the ELA curriculum and can't wait to see what has been created. I hope I am able to bring some of my own units in and somehow incorporate them into the curriculum. I don't think I can go a whole school year without reading Wonder and Absolutely Almost!!
Thanks for taking the time to come with me today Jenn! I wouldn't have done nearly as much brainstorming without you!
Cheers!
Mrs. Frank
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