My Classroom - Photos!


Warning: These are from a couple months ago! It's still mostly the same though...
Below is my pocket chart for literacy and math workstations. I took pictures of my kids and made their picture cards and then there are the icon cards for their destination for the day. We are up to two destinations during Literacy Workstations now, so the far left column has a row of icons. We do round 1 before lunch, round 2 after lunch. Math Workstations is the last things we do everyday, and they simply rotate to the next tub the next day. This is so easy to flexibly adjust, and the kids can read it and see where they need to go! Love it! This is all based on Debbie Diller's books on Workstations. Great Stuff!

Below is my display for the numbers and above that I hung up the charts we did for the 4 basic shapes. These will probably stay up all year long.
 This picture shows a few things: on the far left middle is our behavior chart - their names are velcroed on it. Beside that - the sea of pink are the "Jones Bucks" - the PBIS reward money used school-wide. These are earned for good behavior and are spent on treats and special events. Then, at the end of the shelf in the blue basket, is my "Word Work" Workstation Basket. The "Super Star Writers" board is where I post writing work. In the corner I have the Listening Workstation with Leapfrogs. They carry these to a nearby table to use.
 Here is my guided reading table, with the door into my classroom behind it.
 This is a close-up of the Listening Workstation.
 Below my calendar board and activboard I still have some of these rhyming word posters that we made during our rhyming unit. Like my drawing skills? lol!
 Here is the Vocabulary Board and the Calendar Board. Nothing special really...
 This was how the Big Books Center looked - Now I have the books they are allowed to use in a big basket. The blue buckets on the floor hold one table each of letter tiles - a tool used for Saxon Phonics. Each set of tiles is in a little Gerber rectangular plastic box - perfect fit!
 This is the "Library" or "Book Boxes" Station. Each book has a little label showing what basket it should be put away in.
 Computer Workstation: used for the IStation Program. If I could use desktop icons I'd use it for math too...but I have not yet figured out a kid-friendly way to open math websites quickly.
 This is the shelf where the week's AM Centers (before school starts) puzzles are kept. I have a different AM center for each table and they rotate each day (the activities move to another table).
 Uh-oh-----time out Safe Spot! A place to get your feelings sorted out so you can rejoin the class. All our rules are hung over it and the heart was from a lesson about hurtful words early in the year.
 This shelf is the home of my regularly used math manipulatives and the green labeled boxes are the Math Workstation tubs. The labels match labeled work spots around the classroom. Every boxes label has a matching label on the shelf. This area has stayed pristine so far this year - way better than the disaster zone that it was last year!
 This was the wordwall before any vocabulary words went up. The letters are from last year's letter exchange. We are doing a letter exchange this year, too. Still waiting on a few letters and then I'll take down last year's letters and put up this year's! It's a really cool looking alphabet. Sight words go on another alphabet across the room. Ooops - no picture of that!

Somehow I neglected to take pictures of the room as a whole...maybe next time! Basically this covers everything but the four tables and the carpet area (which is under the calendar and ActivBoard.

What do you think? Like?

Thanks for visiting my blog!
-Mrs. Cobb
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EduBlog Nomination: HeidiSongs

Hi everyone! Sorry for my long absence - you know how busy teaching is! It's Thanksgiving Break now - so I have a wee little bit of time for myself! Woo-hoo! My first blog to-do: edublog nomination! This year I am nominating  
Heidisongs for Best Educational us of audio/video/ visual/ podcast. In particular - I think the videos she posts are delightful and very, very useful in understanding the message of her blog.
While on the topic, I'd like to post a review of her dvd products that I received last summer. I have been using the Sing and Spell Dvd's for sight words with each of our 5 new words every week and my kids this year are doing WAY better on learning their sight words. They love the time we spent practicing them every day and are so disappointed the days we don't get to use the music to practice. Their absolute favorite is the "his" song - the honking all the way through plus the crash at the end is hysterical to them! Then, there is the Letter and Sounds DVD that we use every day when we do phonics. I have many students who already know their alphabet and all or nearly all of the letter sounds -woo-hoo! We use Saxon Phonics, which is a letter-a-week approach - so them knowing so much more of the alphabet then what that curriculum covers is amazing! We have used the Numbers and Shapes DVD too, which was fun for them and worked just as well. I really ought to go through the Little Songs for Language Arts and the Musical Math DVD and plug the songs into my curriculum map so I remember to include them in lesson plans and use these more. One problem I have encountered is that my poor computer in my classroom has been freezing and failing on me since school started, which makes using the dvd's tough. Switching between them, especially the sight word dvd's, can be a pain too. Any suggestions for that? I love the dvd format, but it's too much to load them all on my crappy computer.
So, overall, these dvd's are a tremendous educational resource! I'll have to make a post at the end of the year with the average # of sight words learned- maybe compared to last year if I can find that data! How cool would that be?

 
Thanks for visiting my blog!
-Mrs. Cobb
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