First Day in My Room

My summer class is done (and I got an A!), so I headed off to my classroom this morning to see what needed to be done.

And let me tell you..... I only have two weeks until school starts and I have SO MUCH to do!! Holy mama.

A while back, I posted some "before" pictures to show you what my room looked like. Well, now everything is back in and I took some more pictures of what I uncovered in my adventures today. Here is the view from the door, when you first walk in.

I decided to go through the cabinets underneath the chalkboard on my one wall to see what was inside of them. I want to take the cabinet doors off and use it as my classroom library. Well, when I opened the doors, I found a BUNCH of crazy old reading books that were published in the 80s and early 90s. Here is an example of just one cabinet.

After clearing out all of the cabinets and going through the coatroom (and after talking to my principal) here are the books and materials that are getting tossed! I think this table may collapse before I get back tomorrow. Mostly this is 3 different reading programs, an entire science program, tons of things from old-school Open Court... and a lot of extremely dusty stuff that probably has not been touched in years!

These are all of the math manipulatives I found..... and I mean all. Looks like I know what I'll be asking for donations for...

And a special treat for you: creepy green people that are painted on my radiators!

I need to make a game plan before I go back tomorrow. I'm glad I have a few days off here so I can really work on this stuff!!!

What I'm Loving Wednesday

I totally skipped last week's WILW... I had too much schoolwork!! But this week, I'm good. :)

I'm loving that this is my last week of my summer class!!!! This means I can start working in my classroom. Whenever I see people's classroom pictures, I get jealous. Now I can go!!

I'm loving that my local bookstore is ordering Growing Readers for me so that I can read it. Now that I have read both The Book Whisperer and Reading With Meaning, I am legit obsessed with doing a reading workshop this year. My awesome little bookstore will have my book by tomorrow afternoon, yeah!

I'm loving Ace Hardware! They have a dollar section that I didn't know about ... because I never go to hardware stores. I found clothespins for my clip chart and little plastic baskets that were way cuter than the ones I saw at Target. And all for a dollar! I also got a spray bottle because it was cute... and I'm guessing I'll have to spray something eventually!

 I'm loving Target because they sold $3 crates this week! I got 2 blues, 3 greens, and 1 pink for a total of 6! I cleaned one Target out and had to visit another... so if you still haven't gotten yours for your crate seats, you need to go now! I wish I had two of each color but I'm lucky I got 6 at all! I also got these caddies that I will use for community supplies!!

I'm loving my brother! He goes on my errands with me, keeps me company while I'm working on school stuff, and gets ice cream and dinner with me when we both need a break from home.

I'm loving my mom because she is helping me with my Making Words folders!! She is so nice.

What are you loving this Wednesday?

New School Year Resolutions

[Love Calvin and Hobbes. :)]

A new school year is starting (3 weeks from today will be my last summer day!) and I have made some resolutions! Here's what I'm resolving to do this year.

1. Keep a journal every day listing something that went well and something that didn't go so well. My student teaching supervisor recommended this to me and I think it's a great idea! It will be refreshing to read all the things that went well when I'm having a bad day, and it will give me a chance to reflect on things that I can improve!
2. Start and follow through on the Daily Five. I tend to get these great inspirations in my brain and then not keep up with them. I think the Daily Five framework will REALLY help my students, and I want to do whatever I can to help them become better readers!
3. Do all my grading/planning at school and go home to relax. I really like staying after school in the peaceful quiet to get things done, so this resolution won't be too hard to keep.
4. Celebrate lots of holidays with my kiddos - especially multicultural holidays! It would be easy to just do the next page in the reading basal or the next worksheet in math, but I want to expose my students to new things in my classroom! Figuring out how to use chopsticks for Chinese New Year, or creating origami for Japanese Children's Day, will help my students to see that there is a world outside the cornfields...
5. Keep my desk cleaned off! I am a piler, but I find that if I can just put things away as soon as I'm done with them, I can keep my desk clean. What a novel concept!!

What are your new school year resolutions? Link up with Clutter-Free Classroom to share!

Reading With Meaning

On Friday, I finished reading Reading With Meaning by Debbie Miller. If you're a primary teacher, and you haven't read this yet, you NEED to!

After I read The Book Whisperer, I was so inspired to teach like Donalyn Miller - but I don't teach sixth grade. I was wondering how I could implement similar ideas in a primary classroom. When Beth at Thinking of Teaching announced that Donalyn would answer our questions, I decided to ask her how I could make this work. She picked my question to answer and suggested that I read this awesome book. I'm so glad I did!

Debbie Miller lays out an explicit yearlong plan to implement a reading workshop in the primary grades. She writes about mini-lessons of comprehension strategies and includes real examples of student work. I think I showed about fifty people the student work... I was just amazed!

Probably the least important thing I took away from this book was the pencil sharpening containers she talked about. I, too, get annoyed by pencil sharpeners while I'm talking or while I'm doing small groups. My awesome coworker Ali helped me by making the labels for my pencil sharpening cans using pencil cups I got from the Target Dollar Spot!!!!

I'm so grateful to have read this book. Although I have to implement the new reading program that my principal just ordered this summer, Superkids, I am going to try to do a reading workshop also..... if I can find the time!

My Favorite Picture Book

It's day two of Clutter-Free Classroom's week-long Prompt of the day linky party!

Today's prompt is ... Complete this sentence: "Based on the illustrations alone, my favorite picture book is ___________."


This was an easy one for me. I really tried to broaden my horizons, and maybe bring a new book to some people's attention... but I just can not. Based on the illustrations alone, my favorite picture book is Knuffle Bunny!

I first heard of this book in my children's lit class in college. My professor was overly dramatic and made this book SO fun to listen to when she read it to us. I'm sure you are familiar with this book, but if somehow you are not, let me tell you about it!

A little girl named Trixie carries around her Knuffle Bunny everywhere she goes. In the book, we see her hanging out with it and taking it on errands with her dad until....... it gets lost!

The words in the book are so funny, Trixie's baby talk always makes the kids giggle, but the real highlight of this book is the amazing, creative illustrations! You see, Knuffle Bunny's illustrations are drawn and then superimposed onto real photographs of Brooklyn! We see neighborhood streets and little strip malls with Trixie and her dad right there.

And Mo Willems's command of illustrative expressions is amazing as always. I just can not get enough of him! But you will find that out tomorrow...

My question to you is... how do you pronounce Knuffle Bunny? I always pronounce the "kn" like "n" ... but when I went to Mo Willems's website today, the speaker kept saying the "k"!! I'll keep saying it like I do though. :)

How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation

It's day one of Clutter-Free Classroom's week-long Prompt of the Day linky party!

Every day is a different prompt (just like in our classrooms!) and today is.... How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation!

My summer vacation has been going too fast AND too slow at the same time. Too fast because it's almost the end of July and I am so not ready for my very first classroom. But too slow because I really want to get into my very first classroom! My brain is confused.

I've been spending a lot of time this summer looking through this lovely book. I'm 75% done with my Foundations of Teaching English as a Second Language class! I have learned a LOT! And it has definitely been a lot of work. Since it's a summer class, we are going at double-speed... so I am double-stressed. But I have an A so far, so I feel good about that! I just have three more chapters and one or two more giant projects, and then I am done-zo. Just in time to start school... ay caramba.

I spent a week of my summer vacation with no power or running water! Crazy storms tore through Illinois, leaving us with branches blocking all the roads and tons of power lines down. Since we have a well at my house, that meant that we had no water, literally, for almost a week. It was pretty terrible. It made me thankful that I do not live in a third-world country. It also made me thankful that the heat wave is going to be this week, because if it was 100 degrees last week AND we had no power..... I don't even want to think about it!

I've also spent my summer vacation shopping!! Today I spent a gift card that I had for a teacher store (and visited Dollar Tree), and I picked up a ton of stuff!

I got three posters - a Lost Tooth Graph that we can fill out throughout the year, a Daily News poster that I'll use for Morning Meeting, and a Welcome poster in sign language! I had been looking for a Welcome banner type of thing, and my dear friend Stephanie found this for me, which will go perfectly with my sign language alphabet!! This poster makes me so happy.

I also got the Scholastic pocket chart calendar I've been wanting AND two months of Poppin' Patterns calendar days! They make a pattern. Here I have displayed the AB pattern of August for your enjoyment! So cute! I also got name plates for my desks. I love that they are red.

Yesterday I went to Target and picked up some things from the Dollar Spot as well! I got some stamps...

And pipe cleaners for Word Work during Daily Five (Wikki Stix are cool but they are $20... and these pipe cleaners were $1) and a counting puzzle!

I have also seen friends, like my bff Stephanie who went shopping with me today!! Without her, I would probably not have bought all the stuff I did.... haha! She is a good shopping buddy, especially because she is sensitive to my snobby bee theme needs. Some of those bee products out there are just not right for me.... :)

How are you spending your summer vacation?

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Mrs. Dillard is hosting an awesome linky party about funny things kids say!

Here are a few that I can remember from student teaching...

• My first graders were obsessed with the fact that I'm not married, even though I was only 22 at the time. One day, a student came up to me and asked how old I was, and I told her. Then she said, "My brother is 22. I could give him your phone number if you want." Um!! No thanks!!
• Another time we were standing by the door where there was a poster of all the presidents. My boys were looking at it and finding presidents who I should marry, including Abraham Lincoln. I said if I had to marry a president, I'd want it to be Barack Obama. One boy said, "You can't marry him! You're a gringo!" The challenges of being the only white girl in the room, I guess...
• In Open Court, we always wrote these lines of words on the board that the kids would decode and read. Sometimes I'd go over them to make sure they knew what the words were. One day, a word was "player." I asked a student what a "player" was, and he didn't know, so another boy piped up and said, "A player is someone who cheats on you!"

I can't wait to get into my classroom and write down some more of these!!