Getting Ready to Raise Kinders...Again!!

After over two months of rejuvenation and relaxation, I am ready to get back to my passion of teaching! This will be my second year teaching and I will be teaching Kindergarten again. I wanted to write a post to share some of the awesome things I have found over the past year and this summer to make my classroom organized, accessible and kid friendly. 

View of the classroom from one of the two entrances. 

Here is my teacher table. I had a desk last year that I hardly ever used. I always found myself sitting back here so I decided to remove the huge desk and make more room for the people who matter, the students!

Last year I used this tree and the owls as a positive incentives reward. I had it go from 1-8 and I would move students' owls up the tree when I caught them making positive choices and when they got to the top they would get something out of the treasure chest at the end of the week. I am trying to incorporate more leader in me things.Check out explanation of Leader in Me Here.

So instead I will place the owls on the Healthy Habit I see the students practicing! I feel like this is more of an intrinsic reward and although I will miss the treasure chest, I think this will be a great way to motivate students to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do, not because they will get a monetary reward.

So, one of the things that I wanted to change was the restroom situation. I always tried to only let one boy and one girl go to the restroom at a time.  When more than one goes, playing just starts and there are three other kindergarten classrooms so really, eight kids at a time is really plenty. I am going to have students take a rubber ducky and place it on their desk spot. They do not have to ask me to use restroom, they will just grab the duck and place on desk as a visual for other students that another students is out and they will have to wait until they get back. I found this idea on Pinterest but the teacher used sanitizer which I thought was a great idea but our classroom has a sanitizer machine they can use when they get back in the classroom.

Simply to pick up little paper pieces.  This will also be accessible to students who drop any other materials that need to be swept up off the ground.

This will be a classroom job.  The nurse helper will be in charge of taking those who need assistance to the nurse and taking this pail out to recess for any injuries that happen while we are outside.  Going to put a pen, nurse passes and plenty of bandaids in here!

This was my life saver last year. I got this bin from the container store and I place all the papers and lessons needed for each day. This was nice because I would walk into work in the morning, grab the days worth of stuff and get to it.

As a first year teacher last year, I was required to go to Math unit training and this idea came up at one of the trainings and I absolutely LOVED IT. Once I get students' names, Ill write them on their stick and they move it to the lunch they will be having that day.  This has many purposes. A number line and we would talk about how many more tray lunches there were than alternate lunches and so on.  I also use this as attendance because if the stick is still at the top, the student is absent! This saved me a ton of time. Also, we got some small stickers of the students' pictures and I put them on their for another visual if they have trouble reading their name at the beginning of the year.

This is my small group space.  I have materials ready for my RAP group along with binders to organize student assessments and data to track their progress throughout the year.

Got these from IKEA!! I only had one last year and got another one because it became so handy with storing just about anything in my teacher table area.

Afternoon centers and Math Workstations are on left shelf and library and student book bins on right. 

View of our classroom library. I have each genre organized by bin and then stickers so students know where to put them back at.  At my school we do the Daily 5 for our literacy portion of the day and I added hanging owls to show the 5 different areas around the classroom. Read to Self, Read to Someone, Work on Writing, Word Work and Listen to Reading.  I will be giving students lessons on how to choose good fit books for them and their reading bins more in the Fall vs the Spring like I did last year.

This is our Work On Writing station. I rotate all kinds of writing materials through here. I usually put notepads, dry erase boards, popcorn paper, themed paper and small blank books. One of my favorite things last year was watching students go from scribbling to actually writing stories. They progress SO much over the year. I am excited to watch this transformation again.

IKEA AGAIN!!! The rod was three dollars and the red bins were one dollar each. The students can grab a pail and work at the wiring table or work anywhere else in the room but their pail has everything they need for writing, including dry erase markers with felt erasers!

This is our Listen to Reading corner. I got some new curtains and my mom hung them all nice and fancy and I put in the leaf canopy to make it feel like a hidden nook in the room. I LOVE IT. 14.99 from IKEA-totally worth it. In this corner I have bags with cd players in them and I put around six different books with their cd's. Students can go anywhere in the room to listen to their book and follow along in the book.

Our bathrooms have NO mirrors and I want for students to be able to see themselves every so often. These are from Target in the home and living section. They are plastic so if they fall no worries of breaking and hurting little fingers.

These ideas came from a math workstations book study I did. The number on the left shows them which bin they go to first and then the second bin they go to after we rotate. The numbers  rotate down and around each time we do math workstations and I only pair students with one partner. Just having two students working together causes a lot less arguing and problems and I switched up their partners every so often.  I will take pictures of the students on the first day and use their pictures as a visual of where they will be.

Whole group area!!! Thanks to my huge desk being gone, this area has really opened up and I have a nice perimeter of space all around the carpet which means no distractions or hands playing with any  items.I put a piece of duct tape in the front for students to stand on for the whole group lessons or when presenting their work to the rest of the class. ITS AGGIE TAPE!!-Target.

This is by far ONE OF MY FAVORITE parts of my room this year. I am so lucky to have a dear family friend who made and installed these beautiful shelves for me.  They are so convenient and I cannot believe I went through last year without them. I had only one picture of my family last year so this year I printed more of the dogs and Holland and I . Kids are SO interested in their teachers licves. Especially when they figure out that they don't live at the school, they actually do the same things they do!

I am going to use "Hannah and Bleu's pick of the day" sticks for anything fun and rewarding. This is a way to basically keep things fair and keep all students involved.  All sticks start on green and so If I choose a student for calendar, I can choose a stick and then turn it around to show the red side so that every student will get a turn. I am going to do this for a variety of things like calendar helper, morning message, taking home morning message, fill in for a job for an absent students etc.

I got this drip pan from O' Reileys for around twelve dollars last year. I put a bucket of magnetic letters for the students to sort and it is a great way for them to get used to different fonts of each letter.  They LOVED this last year. I switch out the activities as the year goes on to CVC words, rhyming words, word families etc.  

Got this idea from Mrs.Riccas Kindergarten blog: Here
I usually always had students read a book on carpet and it will be nice to change up activities for the students who finish quickly.

I got this from Lakeshore. Kids like to know what part of the day they are in and what comes next.  They love a routine and if you mess it up, things can get a little cuckoo! This is also a great reminder for me with times because it makes sure I get every lesson in and get the kids where they need to be on time.

This is our Word Work station. Here is where students do all kinds of fun stuff to form words. At the beginning of the year they do activities like alphabet puzzles, sorting objects based on first sound, writing popcorn words in rice and making names out of play dough.  The colorful bins and shelf on left is from Target.  The shelf to the right will hold extra materials.

Bottom row has the fast finisher items.  This is going to be the supply section for the students to get materials they need.  I wanted for everything to be at their level. This means less work for me to get things down where they cannot reach and it makes them responsible and independent.

14.00 easel from IKEA. Got this last year and used it everyday for anchor charts and predictable charts. I got a thick binder clip to clip inn things to it. I am looking forward to our first week of school and doing Chester the Raccoon activities!

I am sure if you are a teacher or know a teacher you saw these babies somewhere online. Wooden Board + Foam+Fabric + stable gun+ milk crate= these fun storage chairs. I am thinking of having students store their RAP materials in here. These will be at the teacher table in back of room.

Loved these simple rules that I feel like any students can follow.  you can download them at Mrs. Riccas Kindergarten

Popcorn words!

Reveille and Aggie books. 

Another great find at Mrs. Riccas blog. She really is an amazing teacher with amazing ideas. This an alphabet monster. Students can use it to find sight words, letters, shapes , numbers basically anything. Cut out and glut to fly swatter and you have an awesome monster on a wand!!

Download Alphabet Letter Monster.

View form the other entrance into the classroom. 

$20.00 Foam frame in children's section at IKEA. 

I am really looking forward to this year. My goals when setting up were to make this a welcoming environment where students are able to get their materials and in turn be in charge of their own learning. PLEASE check out the following blogs. They are amazing and have inspired me to make/create more things to add to the classroom.

http://mrsriccaskindergarten.blogspot.com/
http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/