I'm Ready!!!!....sort of....

Finally! I can post pictures of my finished classroom. It's been a lot of work (but it always is) but I am definitely pleased with the results. So here we go! (sorry in advance for the blurrier pics, my camera battery died so some are from my phone)

The door as you enter from the hallway:

The other side

The Bathroom tags: They put these on their desks while they are in the washroom.

The back counter:

The back wall where I will hang their art.

Mailboxes with FROGS binders and Theme books:

Cubbies:

Our entry door, and view from the door (ya, that's my car, only one in the parking lot).

Now back inside to the reading corner

View from the reading corner

The front counter:

 Birthday chart

My desk (it will never be this clean again...sigh)

 Side counter and theme bulletin board &  My little piles of first day activities
                                      

Close ups of the desks:

Their pencil baskets: where they can keep all their writing and colouring supplies

                                     

There we go, hope you enjoyed the tour, now I am going to crash on the couch and watch TV!!

It's not all about stickers and crayons!

This is teacher week! We are back at school and are starting to get ready for the little ones that will be coming on Tuesday. Not much has happened classroom wise, as the first three days were meetings, laser tag, more meetings, and paperwork. Laser tag was fun, as we got to get competitive with each other and blow off some steam!
We finally got our official class list today, and I am pretty happy with it  (though there are always surprises). I think it will be good year. I am done all my paperwork (schedules, year plans, TOC papers, etc) and I can now focus on the "fun" stuff, labeling, laminating, distributing materials, planning for my first week, and attending a workshop on Diabetes. Tomorrow is going to be busy, but hopefully productive.

As I don't have too much to report yet, I will leave you with a pretty powerful video!

A few more things off my list...

I have been busily getting stuff done at school. One week till teacher meetings (gasp), and I am leaving tomorrow for a mini vaca to San Fran!(woot)!

I put my back to school bulletin board up, ARRR you ready for grade 2?". I will add ships with student names once I get my class list.

I also added a border to my chalkboard, which I use as a giant magnet board as I DISLIKE chalk! It looks so colourful now!!

Then I made instruction labels for my kiddos to look at instead of asking me a gazillion times whether they can use markers or not..... This way when they are doing a project they can remember to colour first, then cut (and not ask what to cut their paper with!!!!!), then glue, etc.... It was a great way to use up the BAZILLION school related stickers I have in my scrapbooking drawers!














And the last thing I will leave you with is the new dance I will be doing this year! It's just too fun! My kids will love it!!

Classroom Set Up Day 1

So it begins.....
I went into my class to actually do work and not just hide drop off my purchases.I usually go in the week before we officially start, but as I am going to be on vacation that week, I had wanted to come in this week. These are the before pics (not bad right?)

The back strip of lino is not waxed yet and that makes setting up a little tricky, fortunately, I have a LOT to do, so it's not that big of a deal.
I started on the library/morning meeting side of the class and organized my toys and books. I bought two 3-drawer containers to store toys (Lego, gears, Playmobile, blocks, etc) and two teal ottomans to pull double duty as seating for the special helper and as storage for my train set and little bear/puppet/barbie furniture. With those things off the shelves and everything else moved to one set of shelves, I was able to free up two more shelves for books! I am very happy about that as my books are taking over!

 After I had that organized, I started scanning my picture books and adding them to my library app!

 Now I know what books I have and won't buy duplicates. I like this app, but wish that it would read all my books, not just the ones with a "real" ISBN number. Oh well, I was able to scan in 243 books! That's probably 2/3 of my pictures books! That was a pretty big job and my back was a tad sore. So I moved on to getting some photocopying done.

I wanted to get my pirate glyph done, and I also wanted to get as much photocopying done as I could, because as the school gets more populated, the photocopier will be in high demand! Here is the fruit of my labors:

I also arranged my desks, so that I can start piling things onto them! haha

Then I went onto Pinterest and starting printing off some things that I will need for the first few weeks of school (yikes it's coming fast) I started by printing off these Daily 5 signs that I found on ladybug teacher files.

I used my circle cutter to cut them out and to mount them onto card stock. I will laminate them later this week. I really love how much these signs pop!!
So all in all, a productive day. Tomorrow, more organizing and arranging! WOOT (I guess) haha!

Getting my classroom prep on!

Today was a "blah" day, so I decided to turn it into a "get a few things ready for school" day. I worked on a back to school pirate glyph, a little mini first week theme I am doing this year, along with my standard frog theme (no real connection, I just found some cute pirate-y stuff and thought, why not and they both like water?) Anyway, I saw this flannel pirate on pinterest  and thought, I could SO turn that into a glyph. For those who may not know a glyph is basically a picture used to represent information. So for my pirate glyph, I took the parts of the pirate and made them represent different pieces of information I wanted the students to communicate. This is the direction sheet, which I had a lot of fun creating, maybe a little too much fun....

The font I used was "pieces of eight" from daFont . I just have to photocopy and tweak the little pirate guy next week and it will be good to go! I also started making my locker labels, in black chevron, from  a freebie I found on TpT.

If you use my glyph, just let me know in the comments and tell me what you think!
Now it's no longer a blah day!!!