It is the beginnning of school, and we have a week to get our classrooms ready. I am doing this, while commpleting my masters in Education, and getting ready for maternity leave in November! I want to be extra organized this year so that my LTS can pick up right where I leave off. I don't want my maternity leave to be a disservice to my students.
All the bloggers I've seen have been an inspiration to me. In this blog entry, I will explain some of the plans I have for this year, as well as include pictures of my classroom. I spent a good 11 hours in my classroom on Thursday. The large part of that time was spent cleaning out closets and organizing things.
This year, I plan on really focusing on my reading groups. I have allocated a spot behind my guided reading table where I put the activities I'm doing with each group. These will be in the blue, yellow, and red tubs behind my kidney table seen below:
Next to the tubs you can see my guided reading shelf. Above it, I keep the leveled readers provided to me by our school's textbook adoption. I like to use those at the beginning of the year, but the rest of the year I find they are too easy for most kindergarteners. Below these you will find two blue baskets. One of these houses the literacy games that are 8x11 in size. I have collected these throughout the year, mainly through the Florida Center for Reading Research site, which has lots of free literacy games for all grade levels. The tub next to it houses word mats gotten from The Mega Book of Instant Word Building Mats. I have run these off on cardstock with letter tiles, and keep each mat with the letter tiles in gallon zip lock baggies, housed in this blue basket. I put these in my word mat/word sorting center. They get progressively harder as you flip through the book. Next to the blue baskets are three plastic shoe boxes. The first of these houses sandwich sized zip lock baggies with poems written on a piece of paper. The poem is also written on cut up sentence strips. These get put in my pocket chart center. Students must put the sentence strips together in the right order on the pocket chart using the paper as a guide. The second plastic shoe box holds zip lock baggies of the word sorts I've run off on cardstock from the book Small Group Reading Instruction: A Differentiated Teaching Model for Beginning and Struggling Readers by Beverly Tyner. These will also get put in my word sort/word mat center. The last of the three shoe boxes contain Guided Reading Activities obtained from the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), and are filed according to skill. I will use these in planning for my guided reading groups. Intermittently, I will find a way to put these into one of the centers once a good majority of my students have mastered them. The three white baskets below I still have yet to decide what I will do with that space. Any ideas?
I have finally developed a system for my classroom library. I categorized all the books into the following categories: Scholastic, Fiction books, Math books, Science books, Old Library books, Spongebob Squarepants books, Decodable books, Read with Me books, and Magazines. After reading in my grad school course the importance of having a good selection of nonfiction literature, I was extremely happy I organized my books and included magazines (which are mainly nonfiction Zoobooks). You can see the baskets below:
I took playdough buckets and labeled them like so:
They are lableled Vis a Vis, Dry Erase Markers, Washable Markers, Pens, Pencils, and Permanent Markers. I found last year that all my pens, pencils, etc would get jumbled up in my one big cup, so I decided to sort them this year. I taped the bottom of these to my desk so they don't fall over. I did another set, and taped those to my kidney table so that I have access to any of these during small group instruction.
All the bloggers I've seen have been an inspiration to me. In this blog entry, I will explain some of the plans I have for this year, as well as include pictures of my classroom. I spent a good 11 hours in my classroom on Thursday. The large part of that time was spent cleaning out closets and organizing things.
This year, I plan on really focusing on my reading groups. I have allocated a spot behind my guided reading table where I put the activities I'm doing with each group. These will be in the blue, yellow, and red tubs behind my kidney table seen below:
Next to the tubs you can see my guided reading shelf. Above it, I keep the leveled readers provided to me by our school's textbook adoption. I like to use those at the beginning of the year, but the rest of the year I find they are too easy for most kindergarteners. Below these you will find two blue baskets. One of these houses the literacy games that are 8x11 in size. I have collected these throughout the year, mainly through the Florida Center for Reading Research site, which has lots of free literacy games for all grade levels. The tub next to it houses word mats gotten from The Mega Book of Instant Word Building Mats. I have run these off on cardstock with letter tiles, and keep each mat with the letter tiles in gallon zip lock baggies, housed in this blue basket. I put these in my word mat/word sorting center. They get progressively harder as you flip through the book. Next to the blue baskets are three plastic shoe boxes. The first of these houses sandwich sized zip lock baggies with poems written on a piece of paper. The poem is also written on cut up sentence strips. These get put in my pocket chart center. Students must put the sentence strips together in the right order on the pocket chart using the paper as a guide. The second plastic shoe box holds zip lock baggies of the word sorts I've run off on cardstock from the book Small Group Reading Instruction: A Differentiated Teaching Model for Beginning and Struggling Readers by Beverly Tyner. These will also get put in my word sort/word mat center. The last of the three shoe boxes contain Guided Reading Activities obtained from the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), and are filed according to skill. I will use these in planning for my guided reading groups. Intermittently, I will find a way to put these into one of the centers once a good majority of my students have mastered them. The three white baskets below I still have yet to decide what I will do with that space. Any ideas?
I have finally developed a system for my classroom library. I categorized all the books into the following categories: Scholastic, Fiction books, Math books, Science books, Old Library books, Spongebob Squarepants books, Decodable books, Read with Me books, and Magazines. After reading in my grad school course the importance of having a good selection of nonfiction literature, I was extremely happy I organized my books and included magazines (which are mainly nonfiction Zoobooks). You can see the baskets below:
The blue basket is the magazine basket, and has not yet been labeled, which among many other things is why I am going to work in my classroom again on Saturday. I have many more books than these, but I don't want to put them out all at once. I want to put out new ones throughout the year, so...I've devised a system that will help me do this...
On the back shelves of my classroom I've put magazine files labeled 1-6. The first magaizne file contains books that I will switch out the first time around, and so on and so forth. How do I know what basket to put them in? Well, as you can see from the baskets, each type of book is assigned a color. Decodable books are pink, Old Library books are green, etc. I have taped a square piece of construction paper of the color that matches the type of book on each book. This way both students and myself will be able to place them correctly. You can see the magazine files below:
I took playdough buckets and labeled them like so:
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