Classroom Tour 2013

I'm just warning you right now that there are a LOT of pictures in this post. Glitter Man took pictures for me and he was very thorough.

First up is my teacher desk area. I moved my desk from the front of the room to the back of the room because it was taking up valuable space in front of the projector, where I need my students to focus their attention. Now I have student desks up in the area where my desk used to be.

This table is off to the side of my desk and it's been nice to have an extra surface to put my piles on. I try to tidy everything up at the end of the day before I go home, but some days it's a challenge.

Here's a pulled back view. I've since taken the outdated recycling sign off my purple trash can. It has my old room number on it from the year before last. Sometimes it takes me awhile to right things.

Peanut Head gave me that sign on my filing cabinet. It says "Sweat dries. Blood clots. Bones heal. SUCK IT UP PRINCESS. He's such a Jar Head.

I like it though, and it reminds me not to whine too much. And if my students read it and the shoe fits . . .

I'm still loving my contact papered filing cabinet, although every time I look at it is a reminder of the fact that perhaps I'm not as sane as I'd like to think I am.

Right behind my desk I have my Target cubbies and that's where I keep all my curriculum binders. I'm a big binder girl.

I'm enjoying having the use of this magnet board, although I haven't found a use for the chalkboard part of it yet. I could tidy it up a bit, but I won't have time until our first teacher work day in November.

I have a student note on the board that makes me laugh. One of my students wrote it to me at the end of last year, telling me how awesome I was, and then she ended it with "I think you're beautiful even though people have said you're not."

I know it sounds bad, but really I'm not offended by it because I don't think she meant it to be an insult couched in a compliment. She really thought she was giving me a compliment and so that makes it funny to me.

Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

I super big, pink puffy heart love my fridge. My classroom is a mile away from the faculty lounge and the bathroom, and I need my ice.

Plus I think it's cute.

I bought this teeny tiny little computer desk at IKEA because I wanted to get my computer off my desk.  I think I've decided that I liked my computer on my desk. Oh well, there's no time to move furniture during the school year. Maybe next year.

Just another angle of my desk area, looking toward the front of the room where my desk used to be.

I totally stole this idea off Pinterest. It really does work, although the erasers can get jammed easily. Plus, if a student really wants an eraser, they just have to pull that top piece off. I don't really care though, because erasers are cheap. As long as they aren't destroying them and throwing them at each other.

I found my gumball machine at Toys R Us.

This is the view from my desk.

My agenda white board is in the back of the room and right next to my desk. I love having four big whiteboards because I use a lot of space when I write. It probably seems weird to have the agenda in the back of the room, but my projector is an interactive projector and it takes up most of one of my front of the room white boards.

By the end of the day my white boards are looking pretty messy. Thankfully my gallon of Expo Cleaner is still holding up well.

I am liking the grid set-up agenda, but I've found that I don't have to fill the whole week out in advance, but as I go instead. That takes a little of the pressure off of me to do it all Monday morning. Plus, plans change.

Dirty little secret time. I'm totally ratting myself out here because my school secretary might see this and waggle her finger at me, but I lifted those two-student desks under the cover of night.

Someone set them in the hallway with a Post-It note that said "Send to Storage."

I'm storage.

I promise if someone needs them back, I'll come clean, but I hope it doesn't come to that because I heart them.

I am fortunate enough to have two student aids this semester, and I've been keeping them hopping at this hexagon table group.

I super big, pink puffy heart love my student aids.

But not in a creepy way.

This is the view looking out into the room from this corner.

I'm not even going to say anything about my bulletin boards because I'm still mad at them for popping my staples.

 I may never recover.

The crates sitting on the counter are my mailboxes for students. When I have graded papers to be returned, my aids file them into the mailboxes. There is one for each class, and instead of having my students' names on the hanging files, I have their number. I number my students in each class from 1 to 30, and this way I don't have to relabel everything each year.

It works well.

The only walls that got painted lime green are right here, this little section by the door. I think if it were more than that, it might have been too shocking. Like I would know, right?

The red dot on the door is a dry erase circle, and when students leave the room for any reason they have to write their name and the time they left. That way I always know who is out of the room. In case of emergency or whatever.

This is just a pull-back view to the door.

And this is from the door, looking in.

This is just inside the door. This is the only picture where you can sort of see my Christopher Robin quote. I had a little problem after I painted my room because it wasn't the right blue and looked weird against my newly painted walls. In an effort to make it pop a little, I created a fake bulletin board backdrop with some butcher paper and bulletin board borders.

It still wasn't enough, so I topped that off by hot glueing some fluffy pink fringe around the edges of the canvas. I love the fringe.

This is a view of my Bright Links Projector which makes my white board an interactive white board. I love it too.

Heading over to my favorite, colorful part of the room.

These pictures were taken before school started, but they are full of composition books now and being used. So far they are working out well, and students don't waste a lot of time hunting for their notebooks. This was a big splurge for me, and one I'm not regretting.

I'm also liking that I put all my supplies in the front of the room so they are easily accessible and not forgotten.

This is the last picture. Are you on Sensory Overload yet?

Another thing that I'm happy I did was to line my cheapo Walmart shelves with contact paper. They look so much better now.

I'm sorry that this post is late, but I hope it was worth the wait. A big thank you goes out to Glitter Man for taking the pictures. They wouldn't have looked half as good if I had done them.

Have a great week!