Classroom reveal 2016

I'm so excited to share my new classroom! It has been a journey to set it up.

 

 

 

This year I moved from teaching Prep (aka Foundation, kindergarten, the first year at school) to teaching a grade 2/3 composite class. I'm so ready for this new challenge! As well as the grade change I moved buildings at my school. I'm now in a 60 year old building, with lots of quirks and issues and my new room is smaller than my old room.

The most exciting thing about the building I'm in is that it will be demolished at the end of the school year because we are getting a new school building!! So, I was given free reign over what I wanted to do to my room - and my first decision was to paint it!

It was a pale blue to begin with, and I had it painted white. I love how bright and light it looks!

I decided to stick with a pretty simple colour palette of blues, greens and beige/whites. 

 

 

 

I'm so glad I did, because I got the brightest primary coloured tables!! Super fun!

After I got my tables it was time for the fun bit of rearranging the furniture, setting up my book corner and organising my 'teacher desk' (or lack of teacher desk). Two years ago I got rid of my teacher desk, instead I use an IKEA trolley to store all of my stationery, I have a bench that I put my planner and computer on when they're not being used, and I use my small group table as my desk when my students aren't around.

Here's my teacher desk area:

Here's my book corner:

Here are my awesome storage tubs with labels on them:

This is the front of my room, where my students sit for whole group instruction (I love love love my IKEA teacher chair!!):

I've got my tables set up in groups of six students:

These are some of my display, ready to go! This is our Wondering Wall (during our Inquiries students pose 'I wonder...' questions which we endeavour to answer over the course of the Inquiry):

I hot glued thumb tacks to the back of glitter pegs to make displaying student work easy:

And, this is where I display our subject buddies (the person they pair up with for different activities in reading, writing and maths, and they are of mixed-ability) and where we'll display our goals for the week (that will be another blog post):

All of these photos were shared on Instagram over the last few weeks, so if you'd like to stay up to date with my classroom I'd love it if you'd follow me on Instagram @jemluck

My 2015 classroom

 

I absolutely love setting up my new classroom each year. This year I have moved back into the classroom I was in during 2013. It felt a bit like coming home. I wanted to give you a tour of my 2015 classroom. I have preps (5/6 year olds) again this year. I have 22 students in my class.

Here is a panorama photo of my room, taken from my doorway.

My small group teaching area/teacher desk.

What the whiteboard above looks like now.

My whole group teaching area. Love me Ikea chair!!

My timetable and mat rules on my portable whiteboard.

My amazing giant cupboard, tables, door to outside and trolley with resources on it.

 Close-up of my trolley with resources on it.

This is where I write up my learning intentions for the week.

Book Corner area.

Close-up of the Book Corner. My students LOVE spending time here.

I use these for my Reading Groups activities (on the right) and the ones on the left will be used for Maths Groups.

The view from my desk area.

Five for Fraturday - 21st February

After a very long hiatus from my blog I'm back! And with a gorgeous new blog design to boot!!

I thought a great first post back would be a Five for Friday! It is Saturday evening where I am, but it's still Friday somewhere!

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I have had an amazing start to the new school year. In my class I have 22 preps and they are all gorgeous. They are an incredibly helpful, happy and persistent bunch. Yesterday we did our first session of maths groups and I set out a few maths activities that were too hard to see how they reacted. Only one of my poppets gave up and had a whinge - every other one was persistent and had a go even if they weren't too sure about how to get it done. I'm really proud of the behaviours this class are showing, and it is sure to be a fantastic year with them!

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As with any start to the year a good clean-up is necessary.

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The way I have set up my classroom (and I will post a classroom tour next) has the smartboard and whiteboard in front of a window. It works perfectly for the way the room is set up, except it is quite bright through the windows. As a way to cut down the light I laminated some cellophane and bluetac-ed it to the window.

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A new school year also needs some new 'words to live by'.

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And a new hairstyle!

If you'd like to see more of my photos follow me on Instagram @jemluck

Rearranged my classroom!

I popped in to school today to quickly print off a couple of things I needed for my trip to Sydney tomorrow. Well, two hours later I left with the things printed and my classroom rearranged!! I had sketched a few ideas last night but hadn't really planned to do anything about the ideas, but then I was motivated!

I drew a before (not to scale) sketch and an after (not to scale) sketch using Doodle Buddy.

Before

Top left is my teaching space (chair, literacy whiteboard, IWB, the dots are to mark where the SitSpots are). Top right is the external door, plus a trolley with communal materials on it. Bottom middle was my book corner and the circle rugs I have. Bottom right is my desk and conference area.

 

After

Top left is now my book corner. Bottom middle is now my teaching space. Other things are pretty much the same.

 

 There were a few changes that happened after I drew the 'After' sketch. The tables didn't quite work as I'd drawn them, and I changed the way the book corner is arranged. Here are some photos, sorry about the chairs being up - so much easier to move tables when the chairs are up!

My new teaching space. I haven't plugged the board in yet, or put my SitSpots back on the ground.

My new book corner. I love how cosy it looks!

This is the view from my desk and conference table.

This is the view from my big internal door.

This is the view from the book corner.

And this is the view from the external door.

I have 23 students and last term I had the tables set up in four groups of 6 students. I've changed that and now have three tables of 4 students and two tables of 6 students. It worked well in the space and I think some of my students will like having fewer people on their table.

This is my literacy whiteboard. I've moved my daily schedule from the big cupboard which is now at the back of the room and put it on to this at the front of the room. My kids love checking what is coming up during the day.

This is something new too. The black thing is for my Portable Science Word Wall. It is just an accessories organiser because I couldn't find any pocket charts in my town. The four boards will be for Learning Intentions. Green for Writing, Red for Reading, Blue for Maths and Yellow for Science - my lesson plans are colour coded too!

This is my third year teaching and every other year I've rearranged my classroom at least three times. This is the first time I've rearranged it this year. The arrangement was working really well, which is why I hadn't changed it, but I was ready for something different!!

Reading groups organisation version 2.0

I love to reorganise things, but only when they are not working perfectly (or close to). I run reading groups twice a week, and have done for the past 6 weeks. They are working well enough, but I could see room for improvement. Enter this colourful tray trolley:

I bought it from Officework yesterday, put it together while my kids were at Music, and set it up after school. I have five groups for guided reading, and I use the same groups for reading groups. What I normally do is have two groups that do guided reading, and they swap half way through the session, and two groups get to do two different activities (and they swap halfway through the session). The problems were arising with the swap. I was finding that one group was awfully slow when it came to packing up, and the other group would then get distracted and muck around. To stop this I've decided to have 10 tasks set up, and each group does their task box 1 first, then when we swap they do the box numbered 2. This way they don't have to swap with another group. My plan is that when they are used to the tub idea I will let the groups switch to their task number 2 whenever the first task is complete - so there is a bit of self-directed responsibility in reading groups.

At this stage I love the tubs (though they are a bit shallow and I've had to stack a couple of games behind the CD player on the top) and tomorrow will be the real test!

I have also been meaning to follow up about the SitSpots that I bought. Here they are:

They are working really well. Whenever I tell my students to sit on the carpet I always say "find a spot" and that reminds them that they must have their bottom on a spot. They have discovered that the spots come off the carpet (the are pretty similar to velcro) but we have tough rules in place that the kids aren't allowed to take the spots off the carpet. A couple of times, when there have been arguments and kids haven't been sitting sensibly, I have asked all students to stand up in a circle and I've allocated the spot they are to sit on. I also use the shape or colour to send the preps out to snack or lunch, ie. "Anyone sitting on a pink oval can get their snack". I tell them I'm looking for the row sitting the best, and they lift their game! One of my little darlings has even taken to jumping from one spot to the other and saying the shape name or the colour - he actually needs to work on these skills a bit so it is perfect for him! Basically, I love them and highly recommend them!

I had an awesome day with my kids today! We started the day with a song, which they always love, and then it was just writing, reading and maths (then they had music and Indonesian while I did some laminating etc). We have started work on persuasive writing, learned the letter Kk and started work on ordinal number. I'm really glad it was a nice day because I'm smack bang in the middle of report writing, and it's a bit stressful!! In fact, that's what I should really be doing now, but everything is more fun that report writing (especially blogging, and even doing the dishes!).

Five for Friday (whoops, it's Saturday...)

What a busy week!! It was lots of fun, too. There has been a few changes in my class, so to bring everything back together and put a bit of excitement into the weeks of testing leading up to reports we had Pirate Week! It was awesome. Time for ...

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I made it Pirate Week this week. It was inspired by our Science curriculum, actually. One part of Science this term for Foundation at my school is to look at maps, so what better way than to make some pirate maps. That was last week. I continued the idea into this week by having a week full of pirates. My kids had heaps of fun, and one of my EAL (English as Another Language) kids loved walking around the school at playtime and going up to students to say "Aaaargh!!" It was very cute.

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On Monday morning we started Pirate Week with some writing. I made up a sheet for my students to use, and they had to finish the sentence "If I was a pirate..." There were some excellent answers! I have quite a few students who are struggling with writing so for them I use a light coloured texta to write what they dictate to me and they trace my writing. They still have to be able to read back what I have written for them.
We also wrote about treasure, and we did a pirate listening task. The listening task was really interesting. Some instructions had two steps, and it was surprising to see how many students didn't cope with that. For example, it might say "find the pirate with the map, colour his shoes brown" and some students would colour both the map and the shoes brown.

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I came across this awesome game from the lovely Lauren at Love, Laughter and Learning in Prep. My students worked in groups of three. Each student had a 10s frame and a 'treasure chest' (we used Pirate themed cups). They shared a bowl of 'jewels' for the counters and had a 'pot of gold' full of gold nuggets to win. Students roll the dice, and add that many jewels to their tens frame. Students take turns, and add to their own frame. When the 10s frame is full, they exchange their jewels for a piece of gold. I absolutely love this game!! My students were totally engaged with it. But, more than that, the amount of maths happening was incredible. It works on the sense of ten-ness (as my maths coach would say), they had to say what number they rolled and how many jewels they still needed to fill their frame (tens facts), I also asked students what number they would want to roll for their next go so that their frame was full (if they had two spots left they would like to roll a 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6, but couldn't roll a 7 because that is not on the dice, and wouldn't like a 1 because it wouldn't fill the frame). Even though Pirate Week has finished, we're going to play this game again next week - I LOVE IT!!

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We did a bit of craft, too. On Tuesday my students made hats and hooks. The hat was just the pirate hat shape glued on to a strip of paper (a bit like a crown). The hook was made with a paper cup and a straw that was rolled up in aluminium foil. They loved playing Pirates. On Thursday they also made maps and telescopes. I wasn't in class on Thursday so I don't have a photo of them.

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I bought some SitSpots! I installed them Thursday night, and my students weren't at school on Friday, so I'm excited for Monday when they get to see them for the first time! I chose to use different shapes and colours for the rows. I plan on playing some instruction games with them (eg. step on the yellow circle, then the green square; or what colour is the square, and what shape is the pink shape). I love the bright colours!!

We had a very busy (slightly stressful, for me) week. I am my school's reports coordinator, and reports are due in two weeks so I had a busy time setting the reports up for our teachers. It is the first time I've had this role, so there was lots of new learning. I'm excited for next week because it is Education Week and we have our school Open Day. We have special events on everyday this week, so there'll be lots of photos to post!!