Classroom Tour 2013-14

Happy Labor Day Weekend!
Who has two thumbs and is excited to have a 3-day weekend? THIS GIRL! ;o) .......I know, I know...it's totally corny, but I'm in a corny kinda mood for some reason.
I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but just in case I didn't...I moved classrooms this summer. It is my 3rd time moving in 7 years, so I felt a teeny bit prepared to make the move. Although even the mere thought of moving all of my CRAP wonderful array of teaching tools makes me cringe and have major anxiety every time. I have that teacher hoarding gene where when someone is giving their old stuff away, I can't stand the thought of it being thrown away, and I take it thinking that I can find something to do with it later on down the road. It's a great way to inherit great stuff, but it's also a way to accumulate as much stuff as a 30 year retiring teacher!!! With lots and lots of help from my assistant and the custodians, we packed every last pattern block and book away and moved it across campus to my beautiful new-to-me room in the kindergarten building! Home at last!! :o)

We went with a color scheme this year: aquaish, lime green, and black. I ordered all of our borders to coordinate as well as, well, just about everything else. I'm digging it so far. I think it adds a calmness to the craziness of kindergarten! ;o)

Feeling a little silly about it now, but I made sure to take my yearly night before kindergarten photos of our room and then didn't get a chance to blog. That was 2 weeks ago. So, without further ado, I give you our 2013-14 kindergarten classroom...

Okay, pretend like you walk into the kindergarten building. There is a large center room with all of our blue cubbies. The three kindergarten classrooms open up from this center room. When you walk up to my room, there is a little alcove (my assistant and I joked that it is our foyer and we were going to put her desk out there so she could act as our secretary). Here is our alcove with a storage armoire, entry table, and our owl tree...

 Then as you walk in our official front door, straight ahead is this view:

(The curtains were my August project and turned out better than I thought they would! I'll post about them a little later...) All of this furniture was in the old room, but this rug was left behind! Love!!!

If you stay standing at the door and turn left, you get this view:

(student tables and my teacher area in the back...LOVING my storage!!)

Better angle:

New behavior chart:

(I made the green thing on top and the color cards, classroom rules are from another teacher...linked in my last post)

STILL standing at the front door, turn right, and here's what you'll see:

(Remember my last post and the brownie points? That's them along with a few other great Pinterest finds like the labels and class motto)

Loved how this turned out! I simply typed up the words "teacher helper," etc. and glued them to the pink paper. One of our K teachers had the letters for Helpers and is letting me use them.

View of my assistant's desk and the art center. MORE FABULOUS STORAGE!

More curtains...and my wonderful parking spot outside: about 10 steps from the back door! 

{Spoiled Rotten}

View from my teacher area:

Grandma's rocking chair and my updated calendar meeting area:

Future word study/writing center in the little alcove in our room:

{Definitely needed the curtains so we can close them when other children are playing on the playground during center time!!!}

Computer/Listening Center:

{I think I'm going to switch this with the word study/writing center so we can utilize this bulletin board a little better}

So that was the set up two weeks ago...this is an updated picture from Friday. We put up the word wall and the alphabet cards that go with our reading series. Also, the blinds in our room only go down that far, so the sun shines in our eyes first thing in the morning on the carpet. Did some switching around and trying the rocking chair on the other side of the room. HOWEVER, I do not like my back to the front door, so I need to find a solution fast!

New arrangement:

New word wall and some student work:

Do you have a suggestion on what I should do with the big windows in the morning? I'm thinking about asking for another set of blinds to put on the bottom of the window.

Thanks for checking out our room! Hope your school year is going well so far! :o)

...be at peace, and all will be well...

Mrs. Johnson Gets Ready for Kindergarten!

Here we go!  We start Kindergarten tomorrow!!!  I still cannot believe how quickly last year flew by.  Now summer has flown by and it's almost time to meet my new kinders!

Let me ask the teachers out there: this is my 5th year of teaching and I have butterflies worse than EVER before.  Does it get worse through the years?  Does it let up a little?  Can I expect all 30 + years of teaching to do this to me at the beginning of every year??  I was a wreck last week - a jittery, jumpy, OCD wreck!

I'm not nervous...no negative thoughts whatsoever...just very anxious.  Anxious to meet each individual student.  Anxious to watch this group's chemistry.  Anxious to get to know them and love them and watch them grow for a whole year!

It took countless hours to get this classroom ready.  I have mentioned my OCD-tendancies in past posts.  Well, the monster OCD comes out at the beginning of the year.  The room has to be PERFECT.  Every way, shape, and form.  Perfect.  Period.  End of sentence.  Get it yet?  :o)

My assistant has helped me so much in the past week.  We were out at school until an un-Godly hour Friday night setting out all of our name tags, getting homework folders ready, taping down names onto the carpet (this is in lieu of a rug for assigned seating - works like a charm!)...Don't even ask me how many "to-do lists" I have gone through!

My friend Joelle came out on Saturday with me to bring my rocking chair and a few other things.  She put up with me for 2 hours (I couldn't stop finding little things to tweak!).

Here it is...in all its glory...my classroom for the 2011-2012 Kindergarten School Year!

I loved our "Johnson" door last year so much that I brought it back!

Welcome, Team Johnson!

Clothesline outside our door just waiting for brilliant kinder-work!  :o)

Here's the view from just inside the door!  Drop off your bookbags and come on in! 

Our behavior cards...they are color coded...maybe I'll blog about these later in the year...

The wall of cabinets and a view of the Math Center!  Remember what the inside of those cabinets looks like??  They are still happy cabinets!  :o)

My teacher spot in front of our meeting area!  The newest addition is my grandma's rocking chair...I could sit in that all day it is SOO comfy!  It's making me a little emotional right now looking at this picture.  And to think I was fine when I carried it into the room...I miss her so much...She rocked me in this chair about a year and a half ago...and now I get to rock my kinders in it.

Our Calendar Meeting area...plus our monsters on the floor...this is assigned seats for the students.  They are far enough apart that it's a comfy fit.

Our story time side of the front of the room.  Here's my new Big Book easel!  The rocking chair over here is from my mother-in-law!  Love her!  :o)  Also, the pink table is new to this room, but it's not new to me: I had it when I taught first grade in my old school, and the teacher I gave it to didn't want it any more.  It is PERFECT at the front of the room!

Our Reading Center!  Complete with the yard sale rug I found last year!  :o)

View from the front of the classroom.

Our "Ducky Helpers" in front of my assistant's desk.

Our Art Center and student cubbies.  Also, I took some magazine storage boxes and turned them into my planning boxes.  I put all of our projects, supplies, manipulatives, and copies for each day of the week in each box (can you find where they are on the counter?).  Just started it this year.  I'll let you know how I like them.

Waiting on a table, but here is the Writing Center!  We will add items to work with as we introduce this center in 2 weeks.  This is another yard sale find from a few years ago.  I LOVE this bookcase.  It has the letters A, B, and C cut out on each level.  If we are blessed with babies one day, this bookcase may have to come back home with me!

My group table and storage!  I got rid of my teacher desk this year and will be operating from here.  I NEVER sit at my desk, and I have plenty of storage and drawers (as you can see), so I decided to just go with this table.  What do you think of our Mon-Stars bulletin board?

Our Center board.  I still have to add a header to it as well as their names when we figure out our learning center groups.

View from my chair at my horseshoe table.  I'm in love!  :o)

Please be aware that our students find out who their teachers are on the first day of school upon arrival.  I have blurred out any place in our room that has a name for privacy reasons (as I always do), but this time it's extra important to secure the element of surprise!  I hope the blurs don't completely ruin the view!  :o)


This post is a part of a linky-party on TBA!  Check out other classroom picture too...

...and all will be well, and all will be very well...

The Kissing Hand

We're almost ready!  Holy guacamole!  Here it is - my very first post about the first day of school!  We start on Monday and have a full (half) day of school prepared and ready to go!  And I owe most of it to my blogger friends...get ready for LOTS of tags and links to other teachers' sites.  Here is our game plan in all its' glory...

**Before I get started...I found this CUTE scavenger hunt for parents and students to complete when they first come in.  If you do an Open House before you meet your students, this would be an awesome activity to provide while you talk to your families.  We have our Meet and Greet on the second day of school (that night).

Click on the picture to go to
Little Warriors
Download this for free!  Love!!

The first day will be centered completely around The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn.

We will read the book together and put together a card for our parents.  This was also a blog freebie!

Made by Donna at Peace, Love, and Learning!

Click the picture to go get this cute freebie! 

Here's what mine looks like:

If you are doing The Kissing Hand activities, go check out Little Giraffes' website.  They have a page-long list of things to do to reinforce the book!  :o)

Click on the picture to go

to Little Giraffes' website

I loved this idea - I ordered enough puzzles for all of my students.  On the first day we will get them to put a handprint on each puzzle and stick a heart sticker in the middle (I didn't think to look for these cutie-patootie stickers with the name of the book on them!  Darn!!).  I downloaded the sweet little poem from the website and printed it off.  We will put the puzzle pieces in a paper bag and send them home with the poems on the front of the bags.  LOVE!  :o)


The second day of school we are going to have a Kissing Hand scavenger hunt to get to know the "special people" around school.  This teacher has put together another AMAZING website with great ideas for the first days of school.  There is a link there to download these cute clue cards.  She lets you download them in Word so that you can customize them for your own school.

See!  I told you they're cute!

While we are on the "hunt" for Chester, the students will wear raccoon headbands made from a raccoon picture and a sentence strip.  They are on the same website as the clue cards.

CUTE!  :o)

When we come back to the classroom at the end of the hunt, we will find heart shaped cookies with the final clue (Chester goes back into the book until we read it again another day).

I am SUPER excited to share this with our kinders!  Oh, and P.S. Barnes and Nobles is hosting an online reading of The Kissing Hand read by Audrey Penn herself!  Yes, her veryownself is reading it while the illustrations fill the screen!  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!  :o)

...be at peace, and all will be well...

CUTE Clothespins!

Happy Saturday!
Handsome and I just finished our lazy movie morning and now it's breakfast-for-lunch followed by some family time this afternoon...  so before we start all of that, I wanted to take a minute to share with you my classroom clothespins!

I wanted to share this VERY quick project with you...

I bought these wooden cut outs at our Michaels store....

Materials needed:

one clothespin per cut out

one magnet per cut out

hot glue gun

Step One: Glue the clothespins onto the back of the cut outs...

Step Two: Glue a magnet on the back of each clothespin...

Step Three: Use these cuties to hang up your examples, handouts, word cards,

...the possibilities are endless!

**Another spin on this idea is to hot glue push pins onto the clothespins instead of magnets.  Then you can use them to hang up stuff on your bulletin boards!

Countdown...t-minus 9 days and counting till I meet my sweet new kinders!

...be at peace, and all will be well...

Awesome Blog!

Please go check out Growing Kinders.  She has posted printables for her Calendar Notebooks she uses with her students.  I started this a few years ago, but because we started Saxon Math and just didn't have the time in our schedule, I had to stop it right away.  Now that I am at my new school and have a little more flexibility in my schedule, I can start it again!  I cannot wait to do this!  PLUS her print outs are super cute! Much cuter than the ones I used before.  She will re-post each month with the new things...LOVE HER!  Thanks Kathleen!  :o)

Who Is My Teacher?

Hey y'all!  Happy Wednesday!  I wanted to share my teacher book that I made last year.  I have made 2 others in the past...I had to re-work them because my life has changed DRASTICALLY in the past 4 1/2 years of teaching!  Think about it...I have only known my handsome for 2 years and I've been teaching longer than that...

Here is my most recent version of "Who Is My Teacher?"  It is inspired directly from a book done by my teaching-idol Dr. Jean!  :o) I attended one of her Camp Kindergarten workshops (this is where my dreams of being a kinder teacher officially started!).  At this workshop she shared her book with us, and I went home the next day and created my very own!

I used Century Gothic font and kept the pages pretty simple.  No borders, no clip art...just words and photographs.  You'll see how I made an OOPS when you get down to the page about my graduation.  It has polka-dots all over it, but the polka dots were supposed to go on the NEXT page!  My handsome was kind enough to point that one out AFTER I had laminated everything...I had it laminated at Staples with their thickest laminate.  I punched holes in the left side and used binder clips to secure the pages together.

My students LOVE this book.  I also put it out for Open House so that the parents can read it too - most of them seemed to enjoy it.  :o)  Plus it is SUPER FUN and SUPER EASY to put together!

Front Cover

I'm going to need to add another page for my sissy!
Totally forgot to put her in my book!  I am a BAD big sissy...

He just got a new job at a new school teaching 4th grade
...need to update this page too! Oops!

I am blessed enough to work with my daddy!  :o)

This is my Hanky-Panky!  :o)

I swear y'all...this is the goofiest dog you will EVER meet!  :o)

See?  Polka dots?  Oops!
PS: those were the signs my family and friends made
when I graduated...they held them up, cheered,
and sounded their fog horns as I crossed the stage!  Love them!!

Would love to see your teacher book if you have one!  Let me know...give me a link or send an email!