Its coming along

Well, my classroom is coming along slowly, but its coming. I thought I would share some pictures of some of the projects I am working on.

 My main stressor are my bulletin boards. There are so many of them in my room and take soooooo long to put up by myself. Just putting up one bulletin board takes me over an hour.

This year, I am going with bright lime green and royal blue in my classroom, and am bordering both with a purple bordette. So far, only the bright green has come in and I am still waiting on the bordette and blue fadeless paper. I am really liking the green. It is bright and happy, and I think it is going to make my classroom a friendly cozy place. It does definitely need to be the brightest color in the room though. Since I am still waiting on the blue, I left the old white bulletins up, and I don't like the combo. Together, they are too stark, so the green needs the dark blue to balance it out.

When I am not doing bulletin boards (which is honestly at least half of the time), I am working on other small projects as well as organizing my classroom.

This is what I created as a fun activity for early finishers, which is an idea I saw on pinterest. The eggs are sitting empty so far, because I am only going to introduce this a few weeks into school. Then I am going to fill it with fun practice activities that relate to the content we are currently learning. I am also planning on having some fun "Reward" type activities in there such as the opportunity to play a math or spelling game on my Ipad.

Our class theme is Investigation/Mystery (think FBI, Sherlock Holmes etc.). So instead of putting class jobs on the wall like most people do, I made badges, laminated them and am attaching them to students desks with velcro.

Here they are freshly laminated. I am having specific jobs for each table group. A is Paper Passer; B is Paper Collector; C is Supplies. Then I also have a few whole class jobs, which are designated by the "Special Mission". These include Floor Monitor, Answering the Phone, Pencil Sharpener etc. Of course, in keeping with the theme, I have given all of these jobs cool agent names such as "Communications Director" and "Inspector".

Here is one attached to a desk with Velcro.

Now, I am a bit worried that students are going to pick at them when they are bored and destroy them because they are attached to the desk. But I decided to at least try the idea, and we shall see. I am hoping that if I really hype it about protecting the badge, maybe my students will be a little bit more careful. If they do get destroyed, I will just go to an only wall job display, no harm no foul.

There are so many half-finished projects in my room that it is incredibly messy. The one thing I have completely finished and that I am completely happy with is my library. Once I organized everything, I bought these stickers at the Dollar Tree, and labeled all of my books based on category

All of my nonfiction books are labeled with a green sticker.

All of my multicultural books are labeled with a pink sticker. Then I marked all of my series chapter books (Box Car Children, Magic Treehouse etc.) with yellow stickers and have a special shelf just for them. I am hoping this will help so that the series books don't get lost in the mix of all the other chapter books.

The rest of the chapter books are all mixed up together anyways, so they didn't get any stickers.

Well, that is it for now. I am hoping to get all of my bulletin boards done by Tuesday, and hopefully I will post a whole classroom reveal by the end of next week.

Staff Training starts on the 12th and the kids come on the 20th! Aaaah, school start is really creeping up fast!!!