Welcome to room 4!

Happy Hump Day friends! We have officially made it through three days with our little people, and we are STILL tired! Man these kiddos have some energy! Our classes are as big as they've ever been this year, and we both have 28 first graders! We continue to teach, model, practice and teach again. We've done some really fun stuff so far, and will share some of that later. Right now, we'd like to share some classroom pics, FINALLY! These are from Erin's room. It's never going to be cleaner than this, so I had to share now. Leslie's pics will come later... So grab a treat, and relax as you join us on our classroom tour!

Welcome to room 4! As a first day treat, I made these signs for all of our pod members (K-1). Our school is separated into three areas, or pods. We have the earth pod (K-1), the water pod (2-3) and sky pod (4-5).

Window with my student's names.

To the right of the door as you walk in, take-home folders, Eagle Eyes (school-wide behavior recognition system), box tops and bathroom passes.

View from the doorway.

Moving to the left, view from the left corner. My room is square shaped.

Colored tubs hold math activities, will eventually be math tubs. Behind my attendance chart is storage for supplies, and math materials.

Colors and shapes cards from our Colors and Shapes Pack. More storage, and filing cabinets inside.

Left corner, science area. Eventually this will have science themed posters and such based on the unit. Meet Mikeriley, our classroom guinea pig. Under the table is storage for science materials.

Classroom library. This is the first time I've had the books under our white board. So far I'm loving it! Shelve seem safer and more protected from little hands, and it freed up a lot of space in our calendar/group area. Books are organized into themes, and boxes are labeled. Our labels aren't the cutest yet, but they work. We made them before we entered the blogging world. We'd like to redo them, but it's not to high on our priority list. :)

Front of the room. Number cards are from our All About the Number Pack. SOOOOOOO jealous of all of your smart boards! Just last year they finally replaced our chalk boards so that we had 2 white boards. Someday....

Calendar area to the right of the calendar. Like our calendar set? Check out Pocket Chart Calendar Cards. The green, turquoise and pink squares (which are glitter paper btw, WAY too cute! I have it all over the room this year, and it makes me so happy!) will have our weather chart, weekly sound focus, and our poems of the month. Not starting those until next week.

Calendar area. Rug hasn't been brought back from summer yet. I've been busy, and it really needs to be shampooed. Green bin hold math journals (and after today apparently our special carpets, and reading comprehension beach ball).

Calendar/group area. Saw these chairs at Target, and had to have. Kids LOVE them! And of course my Oregon State pillow sits on my bench at all times. Go Beavs!

CAFE board, again with glitter paper. Download these HERE. (That border really isn't that crooked. It would drive me crazy. The picture just makes it look funny.)
Update 9/6: There was an error on our Accuracy poster, it had the same definition as the Comprehension. Oops, make sure to re-download it. Sorry for the inconvenience. :)

Saw these Daily 5 posters at KinderTastic (How cute is her blog design? Great blog!) and had to copy to make some to match my CAFE posters. Find these HERE.

Maybe my favorite part of my room this year, is my new word wall. I used our alphabet cards from our All About the Alphabet pack instead of just letter cards, and I love the way it turned out! I can't wait to start adding words. Above will go our Reading Strategies Posters, which I'll add after I introduce them. That picture to come later.

Word wall

My listening table. These bins hold my 5 iPod shuffles for Listen to Read. Read more about that in this post. Under the table stores stuffed animals, and pillows for Daily 5 reading.

My desk and small group meeting table.

Finally decided these needed to stay on my desk. Check out this post to see where I found these glitter gems. Glitter makes everything better! That's sort of my motto this year. I just wish ya'll could really see the glitter paper on my walls. It's amazing the difference it makes!

View from listening center.

New this year, our Hall of fame. Each child has a colored square (glitter of course!) that will display their work for the year. First grader's names are on the little black ribbons in the corner of each page.

My version of the behavior clip chart. Found the words HERE at Teaming Up To Teach. Aren't they cute? I just added some glitter paper on the background.

Here's Leslie's version of the behavior chart if you don't want to use ink. She just printed it on colored paper and it looks awesome. Click HERE for her posters.

Word work activities and games.

More word work, and writing bulletin board. Still waiting for a few anchor charts to be added later.

Writing center, storage underneath.

Back to the door.

Cubbies, and baskets. Like the labels? Get these and many others HERE and HERE.


Thanks for visiting! Hope you found some freebies or ideas that you can use. We'd love to hear and see how we helped you!

All clipart courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles.

Daily 5

We've noticed that many bloggers have been talking about Daily 5 lately, so we wanted to share a little tip that we have. This is our second year doing Daily 5, although our first doing all 5 components. We are constantly re-working things to make it work for us. We may not do it exactly how the sisters would prefer, but it works for us.

Listen to Reading was one of the hardest parts for us to implement. We worried about how much we'd have to spend to get books with cds, how would we keep track of all those books, should they be separate from our classroom libraries? The first thing we did was invest in some iPod Shuffles. These are very reasonable, you can find them for $40, and at times they are at the Apple Education store under the refurbished section. Same warranties and everything!


We then decided to keep things organized, we'd also get matching color bins to keep the ipods and books in, so that it's easy for the kids.


The kids now know them as the "blue iPod," "pink iPod," etc. We also decided that instead of just letting kids choose listening, it would be a rotating schedule. If they didn't want to listen on a particular day, fine, but they had to wait until their name comes up again. Each ipod has different books according to theme, holidays, or whatever we feel like at that time.

The last part was fairly simple, after sitting in a Daily 5 class for a few days. We have Macs, and they come with Garage Band. We didn't need to have every cd, we could just record ourselves reading. Maybe many of you do that already, but the idea seemed genius to us! It really helps because we aren't limited on the books we can choose. Now of course the cds that come with books are more fun, so we include those as well. iTunes is also a great place to get the stories, and those are pretty cheap. We have a master list of books with cds that we all share. It is actually working great! We asked the kids to bring in ear buds, so they don't have to share.

Hope this helps anyone who is wanting to implement Daily 5 in their classroom. What other tips do you have?

Don't forget our Daily 5 record sheet. Click HERE to get it!