The long awaited reveal has finally come. Truth be told, my pictures aren't perfect, but if I were to wait for perfection, you may never get a reveal, you just get me packing it all up at the end of the year. I hope I don't sound presumptuous when I say "packing" but it's my fifth year at this school and I have moved every year.
And so, before we begin, a quick recap:
My first year I was in a trailer and started in October, so we got that thing together pretty quickly. The following year I did not have my own classroom because I did Early Intervention and pushed into classrooms.
Above: 2012-2013 school year, back in the building in my classroom.
Above: 2013-2014 another part of the building
2014-2015, back outside in a trailer. No cute hallway bulletin board to take care of. I have the same amount of students (26, with 16 boys). Here we go:
It all started with me having come off of a very difficult year. I have never quite been able to pinpoint what it was. Was I worn out? Was it the makeup of my class? Was it all the changes? I may never know. But I knew I wanted this year to be calmer. I was never keen on moving back out to the trailers - more so for my health than anything else. Lo and behold, I've already spent two very sick weeks of school this year. So calm - right. Well one day my mom and I were in Hobby Lobby and she and I saw this fabric:
I don't know what about it screamed calm to me, but it did. My mom agreed to sew a skirt out of it for my kidney table and the desk that I keep my printer on. I knew if I used it anywhere else it really would be too busy, but as a skirt it looks awesome! She did a great job.
From there I decided to keep the colors just black and white with gold touches. Then there would just be pops of color in any posters and the baskets I already owned. Also to help with the clutter, I got rid of the desks. My kids last year could never keep them organized no matter how hard I tried to enforce it and I was tired of looking their messes, so we have tables this year. They were already in my trailer since it wasn't used as a classroom last year, so it worked out just fine. My trailer cottage also only has one long bulletin board across the back. I did the background black. I used a party tablecloth as I had seen on pinterest. In the past I had had the same denim fabric for the previous three rooms. I was getting tired of moving it, so I left in the last room since I knew the person moving in. I knew I wanted to make flowers for the corners of the bulletin board. Not just any flowers though.
These flowers are made out of maps - GA state maps. I got this idea when my mom and I were walking around the mall one night. Either Anthropologie or J.Crew had flowers kind of like these in their window display but it might have been with magazine pages or book pages. Maybe it was actually maps. Yes, maybe it was maps, because it was summer and people were traveling. So I thought, Ah-ha, I can do that.
The gold center is a white styrofoam ball cut in half and painted gold. The "glasses" are little kid-sized glasses without lenses from the party section at Target.
The posters on my reading board are a freebie from Life in First Grade.
The supply bin and labels are the amazing Kristen at Ladybug's Teacher Files (I adore everything she creates).
The banner on my writing board is a chalkboard banner that you can write on (my mom's handwriting in the best) again, from the party section at Target. The pencil is a freebie from Lindsey at The Teacher Wife that I have had for years. The alphabet strip above the board is also from Ladybug's Teacher Files.
I had to have this mouse pad from Mulberry Press Co. and my gold polka-dotted Kate Spade planner.
My class pictures, some favorite quotes, and a hand-me down lamp from a dear teacher friend.
I didn't have enough coat hooks for students, so I used them to put my word wall ribbons there, they rest quite nicely right on the hooks - no glue at all.
If you've been around Pinterest you may have seen my rocking chair before. My mom painted it for me when I finally got hired for a teaching job. I had the white rocker on my patio. I had gotten at the end of one summer from Lowe's. When I got hired my mom asked if I wanted her to paint it.
This is where we fill one another's buckets. Have you heard of filling one another's buckets? I am a big promoter of this. I believe in positive discipline. You can see I have a larger bucket filled with pom-poms, I call them fuzzies. We read the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today? and discuss how you can fill someone's bucket and how you can dip from someone's bucket. If you do something kind or help a friend, you get to put a fuzzy in your bucket.
Courtney at Ramona Recommends asked about this board. This is my job board. Everything for it came from Michael's, but maybe not everything - (oh except the pushpins and clothespins, I wanted to keep with the silver and gold and so the pushpins are from the Nate Berkus line at Target; the clothespins were in the scrapbooking aisle at Target). I used a cork board, black and white twine, black and white chevron & polka dotted paper "treat bags". We spaced it out (when I say we, I mean my mom - so um yeah, if you're catching on by now, my mom sent a LOT of hours at school with me setting up - I have the vision, buy the materials and then tell her - she makes a lot of it happen). Right so we spaced it out, we let the extra twine come over the pushpins far enough so we could wrap it around the pins before pushing them down tightly to hold it in place, then we just hung the bags in place with the mini-glittered clothespins.
I made these little titles with some clipart and a favorite KG font on my computer. I laminated them and attached them with glue fonts. Then we cut colored cardstock large enough to fit in the bags and stick up enough that you can see their names. Final picture to come in the next post with all of the organization.
I hope you like what you've seen so far. Let me know if there is something specific you'd like to see or know. :)
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