week before school started and I didn’t actually start at my school until the
third day of school, there was no time for decorating my classroom. The
beginning of my year consisted of getting paperwork organized, holding IEPs,
and aligning all my student’s IEP minutes into a schedule. Therefore, I taught
in what looked like a prison cell for the first few months of school {I took
before pictures, but got a new phone & completely forgot to save them!}.
school evenings to organizing all the stuff that had been put into the room
from previous years, rearranged “furniture” a ton of times, and put up some
make-shift bulletin boards to add some color to those walls! Thankfully, there
is a ton of inspiration on here so I was not short of ideas.
a big improvement from those plain white walls!
Keep in mind that I teach in a resource classroom, so I usually only have at most 10 students {thats like maaaax}. I co-teach for half of the day and pull small groups for the other half.
This is my favorite part of the room – I LOVE LOVE LOVE CHEVRON & I went crazy when I found this rug at Big Lots for only $19 bucks! Such a steal! My students love to sit on the bean bag and listen to their weekly stories or just read a random book – I try to change out the books every month or so to keep them coming back.
Right above our little reading corner I have the Reading C.A.F.E. signs that I actually typed out on chevron backgrounds to match the room – I got all the information from The Daily Cafe website and by no means made it all up myself. On the door I have Cara Carroll’s {the first grade parade} *FREE* decoding strategies that she already had on multi-colored chevron backgrounds — she’s amazing! & the lime green one is our math word wall where I put up all our math vocab with examples for easy reference for my kiddos! I teach 2 math groups – one 4th grade {with the title I teacher} and one 3rd grade – these groups include my students with IEPs and other students that need some extra help as well. I refer to all 3 of these often during instruction & the students love them!
Since I have students from both grade levels, I use these “week at a glance” boards on each side of my dry/erase board to keep me focused on what they are doing in their classrooms for that week and what I need to work on with them in the resource room. I printed off two sheets with chevron backgrounds and just typed Reading, Skill, Grammar, Math on them and slipped them in clear sheet protectors so I could easily change the info on it every week. In the pocket charts below each grade I put the kids vocabulary words for the week so I can reference them any time there are free time. To the left of the fourth grade chart are my authors purpose anchor charts you can download here for free!
On my door is the home for all my “Dixon Dollar” recipients and the rewards they can purchase — I like to keep it simple with the rewards so there are only about 6 options up there.
Here is another angle showing part of my desk, a little table I like to keep materials, large dry/erase easel, and in the blue cabinet I keep all our math manipulatives. On the front is where I keep any paper products {worksheets} I will be using that week using magnets. I have found that by having them hang like that versus laying flat saves me time {less searching}.
These little beauties will be going up right next to our math word wall because I am super sick of spelling my students need some help with spelling out the word form of numbers 🙂
I typed these up myself and I’ll put them on here asap incase anyone else could use them!
Also….. I wanted to share the cutest pup ever with you…. he visited me at work on Wednesday 🙂
2 Comments
Sasha Marie · December 10, 2012 at 2:52 am
Your class is ADORABLE! I love the chevron rug – what a good deal! Thanks for sharing all your pics 🙂
– Sasha
The Autism Helper
Mrs. Dixon · December 10, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Thanks girl! I know.. I almost screamed when I found it! 🙂
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