My Kindergarten Classroom 2012

I am officially in school mode and busy nearly every day with making things for my kindergarten classroom.  As much as I love to blog during the summer, I love to make my classroom the best it can be during the school year.  It's crazy how much my focus shifts as soon as school starts!  This poor blog just seems to fall by the wayside.

Here are a few of the amazing things that I have done with my classroom this year.  Seriously, I couldn't be happier with the results of all my effort.

 I redid all of my walls and added new places for work to be displayed. I still LOVE my eInstruction clicker storage next to my word wall, it's a shoe organizer cut in half for the little darlings to grab their own clicker.

 We all got new whiteboards over the summer.  Yay for magnetic space!  You can also see the coloring books that I give to every student, they are amazing for the few minutes that students need to do something at their seats while others are finishing up work.  Those coloring books will last all year, boom!

 This is my calendar area and reading/word study center area.  More details about that iHelp chart and birthday bags further down.

This is what you see as you enter my classroom, math center work table from Ikea, and my favorite piece of furniture which is my rolling file organizer from The Container Store.  

Can you spot our "Tattle Telephone" on the light colored cabinet by my desk?  It cracks me up!  One day a boy was about to tell me a tattle and I told him, "Is it important for me to hear right now, or can you leave me a message?" He then scratched his chin, picked up the phone and mumbled to himself, "How should I put this..." and proceeded with his tattle.  I just about fell off my chair I was laughing so hard.  Of course it's just an old phone that I screwed onto the cabinet but it works like a charm!

 I stapled these white paper bags to the wall and filled them with tissue paper.  I then wrote the students' birthdays on the cupcakes and put a birthday pencil in the bag for them.  Easy way to see the birthdays coming up and ensure that I have their gift ready.

  I LOVE this job chart!  The "apps" are made from library card pockets (free from the librarian) with clip art pictures of the jobs.  I then print off small pictures of each student and glue those onto popsicle sticks.  I place the popsicle sticks in the pockets and, viola, everyone knows their job.

This is the cutest way to keep track of table rewards and I am constantly getting compliments on it.  Every time I catch the students all working together, or all following the directions, they get a monkey.  They get to choose a prize from the prize box when they get 10 monkeys dangling above their table.

 This is yet another change that I made this year and it is working so much better!  I switched out stapling student work all year to clipping it on the clothesline.  The clothes line is the only part that is stapled into the boards, genius!

 This is my favorite center.  I typed the sight words into Google Docs and saved them as JPEG, dragged the JPEG files onto a USB drive and hooked it into my digital picture frame.  The sight words appear for about 10 seconds and the students write them down.  

Our classroom gnome, Gnorman (hehehehe), is still an active member of our room.  He left this note and a bag with Mr. Potato Head inside.  Mr. Potato head taught us about listening ears, watching eyes, quiet mouth, puzzle hands, and thinking cap.  

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