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The Brown Bag Teacher

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Classroom Reveal: Our Learning Space

Well, it’s here friends! I’ve been hanging out with 23 of my favorite little people for a week-and-a-half now, so it’s time to show you our learning space. (UPDATE – To see my 2015-2016 learning space, click here or the image below)
Let me start by saying, this classroom is beautiful. Not what I’ve done to it, but the physical space. I have four REAL walls (last year I had partitions), 3 huge windows that allow us to work without the lights on, and 4 normal-colored walls (not yellow and red). Plus, it’s about 1/4 larger than my room last year for 7 less children. It’s AMAZING.

Right now, it may look bare, but I wanted to keep lots of open space for anchor charts, posters, and pictures as we start to learn together. I want my 1st grade friends to feel ownership in the space. Since I’ve been blessed with a stunning physical space, I did not adopt a ‘theme’, but focused on clean lines and organization. I wanted us feel comfortable in the space, not overwhelmed, and know where everything is. For my personal well-being, I wanted a calm and organized home. 🙂

So, here we go!

As you walk in the room and turn left, you’re greeted by our writing center. A transformed teacher desk (desk drawers facing the wall), this makes the perfect writing area. The magnetic sides of the desk are perfect for hanging materials or sticking Command Hooks. Plus, the large surface will be great for holding our writing materials and the open space above the desk will be perfect for showcasing our anchor charts. Although we’re a week and a half into school, this is one area of our classroom we’ve yet to explore. The anticipation is killing us, but we are going to hold out for another 2 weeks or so. Right now, we are focusing our writing juices and efforts on Oral Writing.

The small plastic containers (purchased from Dollar Tree) are perfect for offering ideas for our writing.  In the magazine holder, using an idea from Second Story Window, I’ve placed our classroom journals. As students begin to have free choice during our Daily 5 rotations, they may choose to add a story to our shared writing journals. From this angle you can see a peek of the Teacher Wife’s “What Writers Write” pencil. This week, we are exploring “What Writers Write” during our snack/read aloud time. (You may grab all the labels here.)

Kristen Smith’s “Work on Writing” I Can statements are perfect for encouraging my students and keeping us focused. On the side of the desk, you’ll noticed command hooks for word/vocabulary rings. I love Renee Dooly’s Word Cards for Littles. To begin our year, I’ve only included a few of the cards on the rings – summer words, school words, sports words, emotion words. As we continue through the year, I’ll keep on adding words to the rings!

On this side of the room, we also have our classroom alphabet and number line. In May, I fell in love with Jenn Jones’ alphabet and *needed* a matching number set. Friends, Jenn truly outdid herself! She spent days working on a fantastic pack of resources and the numbers match the alphabet perfectly. The colors are so vivid and it really does look fabulous.
Below on our Math Focus Wall, we have our calendar, Maria’s days of the week, accounting tape for recording the number of days we’ve been in school, and space for an anchor chart. On the second day of school, we spent time naming our classroom sunflower – Fuzzy (blue post-its) was victorious. 🙂

In this corner, I also have my teacher table. I use stools from Ikea for student seats because they take up zero room, and they are perfect for wigglly 1st graders! 😉 I have two black, Sterilite drawers under each end of the circle table. One set of drawers is my traditional ‘teacher desk’ and the second set holds my small group materials – blue (high), yellow (medium), and green (low) groups.

The view from my teacher desk…although a week into school, I’ve yet to sit here – ha! *Fingers crossed* Guided reading groups are launching every day this week. 🙂
This is the ‘front’ of my classroom. Being in a brand new school (only 2 years old), we are blessed with awesome technology – a Promethean Board, document camera, classroom computer, teacher computer, student laptop, 3 iPads, and a Mac Mini. It’s definitely not 1:1…but I’ll get there someday! Another HUGE blessing was the classroom rug that was provided by my school. This saved me over $300 and makes a perfect morning meeting space!
On the left I have my 10-drawer rolling cart from Sams. This is where I keep my materials for the week and anything I have for parent/volunteers. All I had to do was change out the labels from last year!
I’m loving Amy Groesbeck’s daily schedule cards accompanied with Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’s clock faces. I added these Ahesive Magnet Dots to the backs, so I can change things in/out easily as school-wide events come up or we flip-flop our schedule.
Walking around the room, we have our Reading and Library area. Complete with a ginormous Sharing Chair (provided by my school), a circle chair, and rubber floor tiles, this is one of our favorite spaces. 🙂 This year, I’ll be using curriculum for the first time. For reading, we’re using Reading Street, so I have my focus-wall headers up: comprehension, phonics, fluency, writing, high frequency words, and vocabulary. Then a great space for anchor charts!

This is our library nook, and we started using it the very first day! My kids know our most important goal is to become better readers, and they’re excited. As a less-expensive, easy-to-clean, carpet alternative, I purchased rubber floor tiles on Amazon for our space. I so excited to say they’ve worked perfectly!

The two bookshelves provided by my school hold our read-aloud, seasonal books for our wooden book display, student book bins, and our leveled library. You can snag the labels here.

Our books-to-be-displayed are housed in Sterilite Large Clip Boxes on the top shelf, and our individual, just-right book bins are from Really Good Stuff. Until I benchmark students, each container has 6-7 books from all different reading levels. I’ve included labels on the front of each container and the number’s Spanish name. (Our school does not have a Spanish language program, so I’m trying to teach language in small ways throughout the year and classroom.)
Being a new school, all of the books in our classroom library are mine. Other than curriculum and basals, there were no ‘real’ books, so our library is definitely a work in progress. With my Scholastic-ninja skills though, things should be looking up in the next few months. 😉
On our book bins, I  included both the Lexile Level (what my school uses based on the STAR Reading Tests) and Guided Reading levels (the information I get from Learning A-Z’s benchmark system) of my students. When talking with students, I will use the Guided Reading level/color. It is more specific and more easily monitored. Plus, in 1st grade we only count to 120 making Lexile a hard system to work with. 😉

 

Then, using plate holders from Hobby Lobby, we have a great book display in our window. Did I mention I have THREE windows?!? It’s awesome!! (But beware, when books or things are close to the window, they may or may not have a tendency to ‘hop’ out!)

Backing up to our library area, we have our listening center area. Acting as a barrier between the two, I backed up 2 large file cabinets (so large I require a ladder to read the top drawers, by the way) against one another. This gives me access to both, but still allows me to use the front for student-work space. I covered the sides with black bulletin board paper, Creative Teaching Press border, MTF Jumpin’ Jack “I Can” letters, and then, laminated a piece of white card stock for our “I can” statement. This will be the perfect space for hosting sorting pocket charts, magnetic letters, and number lines.
We are a PBIS and Leader in Me school, so you see our clip chart in the corner along with a space for our 7 Habits posters as we introduce/learn about them each week during theme! This is all next to our SINK and WATER FOUNTAIN?!?!? I know!
Our listening center functions in two main ways – Books on CD (yes, we rock a 1990’s CD player), and QR codes. I purchased 2 Belkin Headphone Splitters, so up to 5 students may be listening to a book at a time. The visual directions help keep us on track and have been a great reminder as we launched Listening to Reading this week! You may grab the Listening Center poster here.

 

Rounding the corner, you see the last bit of our room – our learning tools storage, word wall, and cubbies. (Snag the labels here.)

 

 

 

Here is a picture of our word wall right after it went up. This is actually the same word wall I used last year. Obviously, I’ll be adding different words but am excited to reuse the headers and ribbon. You can see more pictures and it’s unveiling in this post!
Each cubby is numbered and houses a different students’ belongings. Our classroom jobs, reside on the end-side of the cubbies (sorry I didn’t get a better picture). We applied for our jobs last week, and tomorrow I hire our classroom leaders! 😉

Lastly, welcoming guests into our classroom is our ‘Wow Work’ display. While I’ll have a more formal space outside for every student to showcase work, our in-classroom display is perfect for highlighting small victories. This is one thing I really missed not having last year, so I was thrilled to find space for it over our mailboxes.

So, friends – there you go! I’m so excited to show you our space, and I love how my sweet 1st grade friends have made it ‘home’. It’s going to be a fantastic year! 🙂

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Comments

  1. Jessica says

    How are your table groups working? I'm intrigued by the way you arranged them and that some students have their backs to the board. Do you find students off task a lot by the large groups?

    Reply

    • Kate says

      Hi Jessica, Since I'm at 23 students, only 4 students have their backs to the front of the classroom. Honestly, we spend very little time at our tables (maybe 20-30 mins a day). Most of our learning takes place at centers or the carpet. Plus, with cooperative learning (table groups, a partners, b partners, etc) when we are at our desks, everyone is accountable. So, for us, it works really well!! 🙂

      Reply

  6. Leanna says

    For a primary room, it's SO clean! I loved how you used your cabinets for wall space. I'll probably end up doing that for my cabinet by my desk. It's adorable 🙂 Good luck with your firsts! You're gonna love the land of primary!

    Leanna
    A Little of LiLi

    Reply

  14. Alexandria Margaret says

    Do you sell the edible signs you use to label all the bins. I'd love to purchase printable signs to labels my draws and bins with pencils , glues, cubes etc. As well as name things around the room on smaller cards with a neat colorful pattern. Where can you purchase them? Thanks Donna Renieris. [email protected]. I'm going down to first this year and would love these please send reply to renieris2@ optonline.net address as this is linked to my daughter's email not mine. Thanks.

    Reply

  15. Ashley Copeland says

    I just love your classroom! 🙂 It’s simple and organized. I just found your blog recently and am looking forward to following your journey in 1st grade. I’ve always been an early childhood teacher and have been moved several times, so I understand the struggle. Hoping to get my forever home (or at least for a while) soon. Thanks for sharing!

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