A Room with No Bulletin Boards

I am faced with a dilemma. A major one that causes me much grief throughout the school year. Many times, I find myself staring at my walls thinking to myself, "This room looks so cluttered even though it is full of wonderful student work."

Oh my. This picture scares me.

I want my classroom to be eye-catching--a true representation of the students who work there. When I have to just staple a child's paper on the white bare walls, I feel it doesn't do that piece of work justice. It's like saying to the child, "Wow! You did a fantastic job! You worked so hard. Now I will NOT work hard in making your work stand out. I will just put it up because this spot on my wall looks a little empty."

End of the school year after everything was taken down

It's difficult to really centralize student work when I have no designated spaces for it. In a typical classroom, most people have bulletin boards to decorate which make it easy to replace old work with new. I'm really not sure how to tackle this problem. I'd really prefer not to have to spend a fortune on it, but I do want something that is year-long, meaningful, and a place where students know that their work will live. (And want to put it up there!)

What would you do in my shoes? Any advice or ideas would be wonderful.

My Passion for Teaching

My goal is to inspire. My love is to teach. My dream is to help children see that they are special, talented, meaningful, beautiful, loved. While teaching is my profession, I take it seriously. Each child that walks in my room is someone's baby, and for that reason I must do all I can to help him.

Teaching was not always my dream, but I have found a deep passion for it that helps fuel my instruction every day. This will be my second year of teaching, can I can't wait to begin!

This life we are given is brief. God has blessed me with purpose, with ambition, and with a love for the pursuit of knowledge. My hope is that I transfer the love of the Lord to these little ones and instill in them a love for learning that lasts a lifetime.

My Super Short Post!

Well guys, I'm very sorry I've been MIA.

Blogging in my first year of teaching was a great idea at first, but let me just say that it is pretty much the hardest thing ever to do. I've been so busy planning, printing, talking, eating chocolate, and lying in bed in the evening thinking,"Is it normal to want to sleep at 8:30???" that I forgot to post.

I've been asking tons of questions on my Facebook page about the ins and outs of Kindergarten, though. Drop by to help me out!

I'll be posting a lot of classroom pictures sometime soon. For now, here is my September Currently!

Hope you're well! Leave me a comment with an answer to this question:

What kind of behavior management systems have you tried? Which are your favorites?

My Little Jungle of a Classroom!

I'm sorry I've been MIA all week...I've had a lot to do! Monday was the first day I was able to go in and really get down to business setting up my classroom. I was so excited because my classroom has a GREEN accent wall! Can you believe my luck? :) My aunt took some before pictures, so here they are!

I moved the right cabinet to beside my teacher desk!

The previous teacher left quite a bit of stuff for me, and I wanted to change up the layout of the room to make it my own. So...my cousin and I attacked. We moved furniture, hung posters, sorted books, put things in cabinets, went through curriculum...EVERYTHING! It was fun because we put some music on and talked a ton. She was so helpful and I'm blessed to have had her help! I still have some work to do on the room before the kiddos arrive, but I think I'm pretty much set to go.

I hope that you like the pictures. Let me know if you have any fun ideas that I should add in!

Little library area! I store other things on that shelf as well. Should I cover it somehow?

Hallway window to my classroom! (Ignore the mess on the inside!)

Word wall! I have no bulletin boards so I made due.
We added the missing letters, don't worry :)

Job rotations! I will put craft sticks in these pockets and move them.

Made my cubbies into a little entrance hall.

All that's missing now is a teaching chair and little sweethearts!

Calendar and Skippyjon Jones! Oh, and Blue. That's my shelf's name.
I promise I'm not crazy.

What's a jungle without a palm tree? The coconuts will have
student names labelled on them!

Guided reading table. The blue cabinet has curriculum in it!

My desk! I had no desk drawers, so I put sterilite drawers and fabric drawers under!

Have you tried Veggie Sticks? LOVE them! And I couldn't live without my label machine!

Hallway poster set of praying kids! I thought they were precious!

I left some space for classroom rules, but I haven't even put them together yet...I seem to be procrastinating on creating my classroom rules and procedures. How do you post your rules? I was thinking of doing the Whole Brain Teaching rules because they seem really good, but I don't like the two that say that they need to constantly raise their hand for permission to do things.

Other things I need to are set up workstations a bit better, organize my picture books, organize cabinets, and hang up some paper lanterns! I'd really like to get some fake plants to spread around the classroom. I think it would make the room look more like a "jungle."

Hopefully this post wasn't too picture heavy for you! I thought you all would appreciate these pictures the most! :) Feel free to pin these photos to your heart's content!

What are your classroom rules?

Layout, Blog Button, and Special News!

Hey wonderful friends!

In case you haven't noticed, I tweaked the layout and blog button for this blog! If you have me linked up with the old button, you can grab the new one on the side! I tried to do it automatically, but photobucket hates me. It was a fight to the death, and I think I lost. Can you say frustrating?

Here's how my button looks:

What do you think?

I will be posting tomorrow with SPECIAL NEWS, so come back by around 1:00 CST to find out what the surprise is. :D I think you're going to love it! It's something that scares me the most about blogging, so I'll need all the support I can get from all of you!

Give me some feedback!

What do you think I should add/change on my blog?

Prezi Tutorial for Teachers!

It's here!

My web 2.0 tool tutorial that you all voted on! I had a fun time preparing the Prezi show for the tutorial. I hope that you get a lot out of it! I wish I could have gone even longer, but I know people don't like watching long videos. 

It's a tad shorter than my Beeclip video, so that's a good thing. :) I tried to edit down my video length by taking out mistakes I made, but I'm not sure how to do that without losing video quality. Any suggestions?

Should I put the next poll in the sidebar of my blog or on my Facebook page wall? Or both and say that people may only vote once on each one? I don't want people voting over and over again. Let me know in the comments! I'll put up the sidebar poll now so you can get to clicking!

Enjoy the video and scroll down for freebies! 

I've never done this before, so I hope it works. 

If not, please don't be upset!

Make sure you fill out this simple form so that you can get your freebies...

2 simple/editable Prezis made by me!

Even if you don't want the freebies, I'd still love your feedback in the form below!

Go download Dropbox if you don't already have it!

My Favorite FONTS!

Okay...I'm a little obsessed with fonts.

When I saw that there was a linky party for it...well, let's just say the Queen of Fonts could not pass it up! I probably have over 200 fonts on my computer. (Maybe that's a slight hyperbole, but go with me on it.) 

HERE are my top 10 fonts that I'm loving right now:

I hope these help you out. I hyperlinked all of them to take you to the place to download! You're welcome :)

Join the linky party at Teachery Tidbits by clicking this picture below! I'd love to see what fonts you use.

Which one of these ten is your favorite? Do you use one of these fonts already?

I'm doing this right before class, babysitting, and then VBS. Today is going to be killer!

Summer Vacation....

I love this linky party.
It's so true.
Since I graduated and I'm in this waiting period before the start of my career, it's been so lazy.

I even pulled out my old GameCube and started a new game of Zelda just because I haven't played video games since high school. I know. I'm soooo cool lame!

This summer has been so relaxing though! So here's my contribution to the "You Know It's Summer Vacation When..." linky party.

 

What do I do to join?

1. Right click the picture at the below and save it to your computer.
2. Open in Word or Powerpoint and insert a text box and type in your FINISH.
3. Save the slide or page as a jpg. Done!!

You can link up on Kindergarten Lifestyle's blog post! Join in the fun!

Random sidenote: As I'm writing this, there's a tiny little gnat attacking me. So annoying. Has that ever happened to you? Being beat by a gnat is not cool. Especially during SUMMER VACATION!