Five for Friday (with a classroom tour)!

First week of the school year = done! Five days without kidlets should have been enough time to get everything ready and organised... but meetings, catch up chats and general procrastination meant that Friday afternoon saw me madly rushing to make sure that my classroom was set up ready for next week.   I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs (for the first time in ages!) to share some random moments from my week back at school with Five for Friday.

1. After moving all of the furniture into piles in the middle of the room for the carpets to be cleaned over the holidays, it took me a while this week to decide where I wanted everything to go.  It was tempting to set the room up just the same as it was last year - but changing the layout and look of the classroom always helps me to feel excited about the new school year.  I don't think I've ever shared photos of my room before (apart from the odd one here and there of specific areas) so I took a few snaps before I left yesterday.  Please excuse the bare pinboards that are waiting to be covered with art and crafts when the kidlets arrive!

This is my main teaching area.  The kidlets sit on the coloured mat, and the board above the whiteboard is home to the calendar (free on TpT), birthdays, rules and soon will have our monster manners (from Growing Kinders pack, also a freebie!).  The Share Chair lives in the corner to the right, and that's the Writing Corner to the left.

Storage shelves - the glass panel looks into my office.  The yellow sheets on the window are sticker charts. :)

Small group table and reading corner.  The white door leads out to the foyer.  

 Looking back to the desk area.  From the left - home corner against the wall (goes around the corner too), Creation Station (those white baskets won't stay there!), door to the outdoor area, smart board, door to the TA office, kids' lockers.

Almost the whole room, looking this time from the back door.  Word wall on the purple board. The door on the right leads into the kitchen.

2. iPad storage has always been a bug bear of mine. Previously I had just piled them on the shelf, but they always looked messy which annoyed me.  Turns out that one of the file storage racks (I call them toaster racks) I had sitting around was the perfect solution! I'd seen this idea somewhere, probably Pinterest, and am so glad I remembered to try it out.  It's super easy to plug the chargers in when they're stored like this, too!

3. After my first year of using the peg chart as a behaviour management strategy, I made my 'Super Kid Hall of Fame' poster to display the pegs of the sweeties who earned themselves 2 jewels during 2013.   I make it very, very tricky to earn a jewel so they are a super special reward.  I'm hoping that the chance of appearing in the 2014 Hall of Fame will be a great motivator for this year's Preppies. :)

4. Bargain of the week - $1 Jump Frogs to use in fine motor activities!  These froggies are perfect for little fingers to play with.  Either have them jump the frogs onto the plate that comes in the pack, or create paper/card 'ponds' with letters, numbers or words on them and have the kidlets read whatever their frog lands on.  They look easy, but some children really struggle with using their pointer finger to make the frog jump. (Aussie friends can find them at Big W.)

 5. To celebrate the beginning of our school year, I'm having a sale in my TpT store!  Everything is 20% off until Monday night.  Pop on over to grab a bargain!

Well folks, that's all from me.  Happy Australia Day weekend everyone! :)

Lauren

Free Apps? Yes Please!

Happy Monday friends!  What gorgeous weather we enjoyed on the coast today: 27 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.  It's amazing how a little bit of sunshine can make Mondays feel so much nicer... perhaps the knowledge that we only have 4 days of school this week is contributing to that also. :)

I had a post all planned with photos of some writing my beautiful Preppies have been doing, but 2 of my emails from my iPad (that I leave at school) to myself with the photos attached have been lost in cyberspace somewhere. :(  So I decided to share something with you that you will probably like even more!

If you have an iPad or two that you use in your teaching - or even if you love to play games on your phone! - you will know just how expensive it can be to buy useful apps.  Apps Gone Free is an amazing little friend that gives you a daily list of apps that are free for a limited time.  The list is based on the popularity and quality of the app, not because it's developer has nominated it, so every app is worth owning!  Each app is free for a while, and then goes back to it's regular price.  There's puzzles, games (educational and otherwise), photo editing tools, lifestyle tips and tricks... the list goes on.  So far I've downloaded a heap of apps for school and home. :) Just this morning I nabbed 'Country Mouse and City Mouse' and 'The Little Red Hen' interactive readers.

 

I hope you find this little recommendation handy!

Lauren

Games in the Classroom

My Preppies absolutely LOVE playing games.  I use them in our Literacy and Maths rotations, and then move them to be a 'free choice' option for a bit of learning disguised as play!  Here's a few of our favourites (that I'm sure you've seen online before!):

1.  I call this one 'Power Tower'.  The kidlets take turns to choose a cup from the pile.  If they can read the sight word written on it, they are able to add it to the Power Tower.  For low-ability groups I help and we figure the tricky words out together.  The motivation of missing out on adding a cup to the tower is enough to make the other groups think long and hard about the tricky words, and we rarely have to pass on a word.

2.  My 'Splat!' mats were the best thing I made this year for my classroom.  I'd been using 'Splat!' as a way to practise sight word recognition, but I was forever losing my laminated flies and bugs - of which I had hundreds in order to cover all of the words in our sight word program.  These mats make it so easy to play - grab the mats that cover the lists you want to revise, grab the fly swats and off you go!

3.  I'd say that 'Gone Buggy' is the favourite of all the Maths games we play in my classroom.  I use a pocket dice, some dollar store bugs and laminated jars.  The kidlets love to add bugs to their jar when they roll a number, but are always disappointed when they roll the bug spray or a fly swat!  First to 10 bugs wins. :)  I originally saw this idea over at Kindergarten... Kindergarten.

4.  Oh iPads... is there anything you can't do? I have 10 iPads in my room and I use them for independent skill practise, listening stations, as a reward and for those kidlets who respond well to the visual/auditory/kinaesthetic combo (uh... that may be all of them!).

Do your kids love games as much as mine? :)

Lauren

Monday-itis

Happy Monday everyone!  I hope your day was better than mine.  I had one of those days where I just couldn't shake a bad case of Monday-itis.  Here's a few photos of what happened in my room even though I was in a grump!

Turns out I made a slight miscalculation when making the templates for some sight word watches that we made this morning.  The little wrists of my kidlets are so much tinier than I had imagined!  Nevertheless, they loved their fab accessory and wore them proudly all day.  A quick, easy way to have their sight words visible.

I finished off this guy - a letter monster who is going to chomp away at some initial sound pictures tomorrow morning.  I'm going to match this with an awesome freebie - 'The Day a Monster Came to School' - from Kathleen at Growing Kinders.  It's all about manners and following the rules and is super cute.

What a lovely surprise waiting for me when I came back from dropping the kidlets at French - 10 iPads for my classroom!  We have 30 altogether in Prep but decided to divide them between the 3 classes so we can have them all day, every day!  Anyone got any terrific ideas of how to use iPads in the classroom?

Anyway, since everyone knows that the only acceptable way to end a horrible day is by eating a whole tub of ice-cream, I'm off to get stuck into some mint choc chip while laminating and slicing. :)

Lauren