Welcome to my class!

As my first summer as a teacher is quickly coming to an end I look back and realize how many things I thought I would have "plenty" of time to accomplish for this upcoming school year. Of course I waited until this week to start tackling this list so I have put in a ton of hours and I have to mention that I couldn't have crossed off so many items (seriously my favorite part of list making) without the help of a handful of awesome helpers! Here's a sneak peak of what we have accomplished this week.

My Door

-Our school theme is superheroes so I searched and searched until I found my favorite idea!-

Here was my inspiration...

Writing Center

Work on Writing is a part of the Daily 5 rotations that each student goes to everyday. My goal is to organize the room in sections for each subject. I bought the "write" cardboard letters from Hobby Lobby and spray painted them black. My dad delivered the desk from my old bedroom that my Grandpa made him when he was a kid AND he brought a cute lamp that he picked up at a garage sale for me. And I am really excited about the black paper organizer that I picked up at a garage sale for a few cents last year. My Gramps helped my spray paint the organizer and it will be the perfect home for all of our different writing prompts and construction paper. I am going to fill the bulletin board with examples of different things students can write (poems, letters, lists, recipes, etc.)

I love A Cupcake for the Teacher's "Writing Center Starter Kit!" that you can buy here.

Word Work/Daily 5 Clip Chart

Every morning during Daily 5 rotations I call my tables to go pick their rotation. The students know that only 5-6 can work on each rotation at a time and they must go to a new rotation each time. I decided to add stickers to my chart for the students to clip their clothes pin to. I cannot tell you how many times a student came to report that more than 5-6 people chose the same rotation. Hopefully this solves that problem. The students love all of the hands on activities found in this station. Although their all-time favorite is always being called to the horseshoe table for "Meet with the Teacher".

When the students choose to go to word work they are then given 14 options to choose from to practice reading and spelling their weekly sight words and spelling words. These activities range from simply writing the words with colorful markers to creating sentences using their words. I love that this gives the students hands-on practice and they don't even realize they are learning because they are having so much fun! I store all of the recording sheets in these file folders and the students do a great job helping me keep these filled.

I made matching labels for all of the manipulatives that go along with word work including stamps, beads, play-doh, wikki stix, dice, and paper clips. 

If you are interested in using this word work station in your classroom you can find it in my TPT store here. It is called the Sight Word Mega Pack. I have included the labels for the file folders, recording sheets for each activity, the labels for the manipulative buckets, and a slides to use each week with the Arlington ISD sight words. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my first blog post - I can't wait for the many more!