a blog for jess...

Jessica is one of my all time best buds! Jess is quite the baker herself, but we have a lot more than that in common. For one, our kids "match". She has a son that is a few weeks older than Collin and a daughter that is two months older than Emie. To top it all off, we are both teachers. In fact, we met when we were teaching in Savannah, but we've both since left good 'ole Gadsden Elementary School and I miss her dearly!

One of the things I loved most about working with her was the fact that we were both creative and we could bounce ideas off each other. A while back, she asked me to send her some pictures of my classroom...here ya go, Jess!

I have these cute little guys all over the room. They're hot glued to clothes pins so I can switch out student work frequently.

This is the bulletin board outside my room. This monkey's been "hanging" around in my classroom decoration arsenal for a while! (I've used him since I was a first year teacher...thanks Oriental Trading for a great product.)
This is on my white board. Everything is magnetic. When the kids come in each morning, they move their card to let me know what their lunch choice is. It makes attendance and lunch count SO easy.

This is my classroom door.
Here you see our "While You Were Absent" crate and our "Can Tab Frog". We collect can tabs for our 4H club.

The crate has 31 file folders, labeled 1-31. Whenever a kid is absent, we put his/her work in the folder that corresponds with their absence date. When they come back, they check the crate to know what they missed.
This is also on my white board. I like the fact that everything is magnetic...that way I can move groups around quickly whenever we need a change.
This is "command central". It's where I keep all the supplies for students, extra books, and copies that I use during the week. I've also had those multi-colored supply drawers since my first year!
These maps are actually fabric. Whenever we read a book or story, we talk about where the story takes place and sometimes where the author is from. There's none on here yet, but we put little gold stars on each location when we talk about it.


The sign reads: "Not everyone who chased the zebra caught it, but he who caught it chased it." hmmm....

Classroom library...I found the lamp at Lowes for $19! (Right now I'm using the pocket charts for my word wall, but soon the "Wild About Reading" bulletin board will be sacrificed for that!)

Each student is expected to read 25 books each year...this is how I track it.

An easy bulletin board that I can keep up year round...