We had our Meet the Teacher Open House last night and I had 15 out of 18 students show up. They were a bunch of cuties and I'm sure it's going to be a great year! The superhero theme was a huge hit and I think it turned out well. I'm really pleased with the things that I made. Here's a quick tour of the room.
I forgot to take a picture of my door but I used the superhero clip art and printed out each hero on magnet sheets (I put two to a page) and used a scrapbooking tool to cut them out in an oval shape. I also used a magnet sheet and made a sign welcoming visitors to the home of Mrs. Cooper's Caped Crusaders.
When you walk in my door, the cubbies are on the wall to your left and there is a long bulletin board above them. I decided to make a portion of the board a content area word wall (using cards from the fabulous Anna Brantley) and the other half of the board currently has our Warrior's Expectations and our class rules. The word wall will end up expanding into that half at some point during the year.
I love how my speech bubble title looks. I found the adhesive speech bubbles in the party section at Walmart. I didn't know how I was going to use them but they just screamed comic book when I saw them. I paired them up with superhero masks that came in an activity book that I found somewhere this summer.
The computer area is in the corner next to the cubbies and then you're up front where we have our Smartboard and group meeting area. This is where I put my Daily 5/Cafe board.
There is one superhero for each CAFE area: Captain America is Captain Comprehension, Aquaman is Accuracy Aquaman, Flash is Flash Fluency and Wonder Woman is Wonder Word Woman (expanding vocabulary). I them made the strategy cards for each area and the strategy card shows the corresponding superhero so it's easy to tell which area the card belongs with.
Here's my superhero behavior chart! (Sorry for the glare)
If you stuck through this long thanks for your interest. I'll post more pictures soon. I need to get ready to head to bed and rest up for our first day.
I just finished downloading my TpT purchases after getting some great deals at the back to school sale. $41 worth of goodies for only $34, what a bargain! I bought some common core assessments for ELA and Math from The Lesson Plan Diva, a common core aligned unit on fairy tales, a Wizard of Oz sight word game and some new word wall cards just to name a few of the items. My printer will be busy tomorrow when I get to school. Good thing I bought new ink cartridges for my color printer at Office Depot's Teacher Day extravaganza on Saturday (sale on HP ink included a ream of HP paper)!!
Tomorrow morning will be our "marathon" faculty meeting but I'll have the afternoon to work in my room. Our "Meet the Teacher" Open House will be on Tuesday afternoon so everything to do with the classroom appearance needs to be done by then. Students will come on Thursday so I'll have all day Wednesday to get other things done. It's going to be a great week!!
We headed back to school last week on Wednesday for a day of training before our "official" first day on Thursday. Wednesday's training included more information on the common core standards that first grade starts this year. We got both a revised math and reading curriculum reflecting the new standards as well as a new social studies curriculum. It's going to be a year with many instructional changes. On Thursday morning we went to the high school for the annual "Welcome Back Breakfast." I love this event because it's a chance to see friends at others schools and catch up on the news as well as hearing all of the new teachers in the county being introduced by their new principals. This year was kinda bittersweet since this is the last year with our current superintendent of schools since he is retiring after the election in November. (This is the man who hired me 25 years ago after I had interned at Shadeville in a first grade class. I was thrilled to be hired the next year and I've never considered making an employment change.) He's been a hands-on superintendent who visits the schools during the Open Houses and he's always come to the school several times a year for visits to classrooms. It's going to be strange to have someone else taking his place in a few months. Oops, sorry I digressed! Thursday afternoon we met as a grade level to make some plans for the year and discuss how we would be handling the curriculum changes. Friday was supposed to to be our data day but due to programs not being ready and uncooperative computers we ended up getting most of the day to work in our rooms instead! YEA!!! I've gotten a lot done in my room with my new superhero theme and I can't wait to post some pictures next week after I get everything up. (One of teaching buddies is encouraging me to sell some of my superhero items that I've made on TpT. Maybe after I post pictures of my class I"ll upload them and pin them to Pinterest as see what happens.) Speaking of making items, I need to get busy making a few more signs to finish up my Daily 5 board.
