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...