I FINALLY have my pictures of my room taken, and have a few minutes to sit down and write about my classroom. This year, my room got a makeover! It was boring "contractor's cream". As part of our 21st Century Classroom proposal, my partner and I asked to have our classrooms painted. She chose yellow, I chose blue. I wanted a blue-green, but it painted on a lighter shade of blue. I wasn't sure after one wall, but when it was done, I fell in love! The staff in the building have been stopping in oo-ing and ah-ing over it. I'll sneak in and get a picture of my partner's room. I like her yellow, too, but for me, the blue is more calming.
I'll walk you through some of my changes. First of all, I got rid of all of my desks and chairs!! These pictures were taken before our new Noodle chairs came in, early last week. I used to have 3 small tables in addition to student desks in my classroom. They are all gone, except for one new table, which is a technology table with 4 plug-ins for computers/tablets. It will also have a monitor attached to the back so I can project what I want my kiddos to do, step by step. I have 5 Chrome books available to use in my classroom unless someone in the school needs to check one out for assessments or some other reason. I also have 5 iPads dedicated to my room. We are also on the first grade iPad schedule for the cart. It has 28 iPads on the cart, and comes to our classroom twice a week. I am in the process of making flip books for each of my students so they'll have their passwords saved in one place, as well as QR codes for access to sites.
This view is taken from my classroom door. You can see how much light comes in from my new window! It's great! I have very little ceiling light needed. I had that changed, too. My husband and I own a furniture store, and we contacted our lighting experts. They recommended 2500-3000K light bulbs. My district wanted to put in 5000K bulbs. The district put in their 5000K bulbs, and after I re-routed several jets to the local airport (YES, THE BULBS WERE THAT BRIGHT), I had the bulbs changed to the ones I requested. As a migraine sufferer, it was something I really needed to have. The yellow-orange spectrum color bulbs are softer and less harsh for my kiddos, and much better on my headaches (I still get them, but with less severity).
Do you LOVE the little mushroom chair??!! It's the Runtz Ball chair. We purchased ours through Smith Systems
, which is where all of our desks and chairs came from. We also have some Hokki stools, some rockers and Flavor Noodle Chairs (not shown, as they came after I took pictures). My desks are the Mini Diamond Desks
https://smithsystem.com/furniture-types/desks/with locking casters. I'm not sure if my kiddos are accidentally locking them, or if I have someone who is going around locking them all for me. The purpose of the casters is to be able to move the desks quickly to have large groups work in the room. I plan to host all Skyping sessions in my classroom, so we will need a bit more room for my room and my teaching partner's room to join us.
Pretty much the only drawback of the diamond desks (which I anticipated) was the width at the top of the desks. The area for a name plate is only about 11 1/2". I needed to find something from the internet vs. purchasing something pre-made, which is what has been done for me for the past 10 years. Luckily, I found a really nice set at
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Back-to-School-Desk-Nameplates-145986. Teachers are the BEST!!!
I posted a question on a Facebook chat group, and within 3 minutes, I had 15 suggestions from friends around the country!
The little scoop rockers were THE RAGE this summer!!! It took me forEVER to find them, and then in the right color? PaLEEEZE! My husband asked, "How many of them are you going to buy?" Lol - two, once I have the right colors. :)
The blue comfy chairs are from a DonorsChoose project I did several years ago - one of my class's favorite reading hangout places!
Do you love how the new windows flip in?! Good thing my students aren't too tall! Ugh! I'm not sure who made the decision on those windows, but we're lucky they'll work. Window treatments are supposed to be coming in soon. With a Safe and Secure building, I hope so! It's a big window to try to cover!
The last pic for tonight's post...my desk. It, too, is on casters! My Smurf checks names on papers - first: to make sure they're on them, and second: that they're all turned the same direction, lol. It saves me a little bit of time, so it's worth it.
As far as technology, I have an iPad, a laptop and a desktop computer for my teacher use. The laptop is a bit of a beast, but it'll work for now. I will be piloting Splashtop, which will make my iPad work as my desktop computer - hoping it'll work, as it's hard to run from my Smart Board back to the desktop every.stinkin,time.it.doesn't.work. I have renamed my Smart Board, "Ornery Board". :)
Anyway, this is my home away from home.
Have a GREAT week!!
Here's another example of my low tech media. :) I have a few cassettes from years of collecting points and a slight obsession of books (shhhh, my family doesn't really know how many books I own). I have cassette players in the yellow "cupcake" bags and a CD player in the blue "star" bag (aren't they cute!! - they're from Target One Spot). The maroon dish tub holds my book choices in book bags, labeled with matching pictures of either the cupcake bag or the star bag, so my firsties know if they ar to use the cassette player or the cd player (in the fall many of the kiddos look at the cassette players and cassettes like they're from Mars). In the white tub I have Dr. Seuss totes (also from Target One Spot). In these, I have mp3 players. Our district has Literacy by Design for our literacy curriculum. We have read along stories for each theme which the students have available after we use them whole group. I took the picture before we started the year, so the totes are empty. Each of my totes are labeled with a number, as are my mp3s and the books. If a book or an mp3 is misplaced, we know which to look for. :) You can see the edge of little green basket next to the maroon tub - I have several headphone splitters and adapters in there, so kids can listen together, and most of the cassette players need the larger adapter to work. It takes a bit of teaching to get everyone on board for these, but you can usually get a few "experts" in the classroom to help.
