My nest linky party

I have anxiety about joining this linky party.  Ha, that's cuz I don't want my inner slob to show on the internet.  I guess I have two nests at school...

The first nest is the one I like best because my laptop and document cam are there!  This picture is post my after school cleaning.

good: I love having my desk in the middle of the room.  It helps me keep it clean because I actually spend time there now.
bad: That nasty paper sorter gets so junky looking!  I need to go through and purge.  (There are also two bins you can see poking out from under my desk.  I'm hoping some elves live under there and will clean those out for me... I'm still waiting.)


ugly:  This is what it usually looks like at the end of the day.  Eeeeek!  I tend to keep going at rabbit pace all day and never stop to put (or even throw) things away until after the kids are gone.  I wish my desk were closer to the recycle bin!

This is my other nest... I hate the clutter surrounding it.  I even sewed a curtain to hide some of the clutter... unfortunately I don't think I made it big enough, it really needed to cover the whole small group area!

good: My "do not disturb" hat - When I am in small group or assessing kids I put it on, then the kids know not to bother us.  Sometimes I forget to put it on and the kids happily remind me when I try to shoo them away.  I probably look ridiculous... but hey, whatever works, right?
bad: Too much stuff!  I need to throw some away, but of course then I'll need it.  Am I the only one that identifies with the show Hoarders?  They should make an episode dedicated to teachers.
ugly: My small group table has been MUCH neater in past years.  I blame it on that nasty cabinet thingy.  I need to find a teacher to swap a bookshelf with me if I am in the same room again next year.

I'm too embarrassed to show you the nest I am sitting in right now at home (I have completely taken over the coffee table and one side of the couch), and the spare bedroom that has become a giant walk-in teaching closet.  My fiancee keeps asking me to do something about it.  Each time he asks, I go in there and move crates around, but somehow I don't think that's what he has in mind.  I even promised to bring some if it to my classroom, but then he realized June is just around the corner and it will all end up back at home anyway! ;)

My First Linky Party!!!

Always First Grade has been hosting a classroom photos linky party and I have enjoyed seeing everyone's classrooms so much that I have decided to share mine.

 

This is the view when you walk in my room.  Please excuse the mess on the students tables, today we were  SOOOOOOOOOO busy (Making these cone shaped leprechaun faces from What the Teacher Wants) we didn't have time to clean up at the end of the day.  In fact, if it weren't for another TA popping her head in our door at 2:15 we wouldn't have noticed that it was the end of the day at all!  Don't you love days like that where everyone is so engaged?   I think I forgot to take a close up of a student table, but I love keeping them in collaborative groups with community supplies. 

 

We are lucky enough to have four student computers; unfortunately, one is out of order right now.

My small group area…I had a tall bookshelf behind my small group area in my old room.  I liked it much better than that beastly cabinet.  The middle shelf is nice and tall, but the storage space behind the cabinet doors is awkward and useless since it has a ton of vertical dividers (for file storage I guess).

These are my student mailboxes.  I love them.  It makes it so easy to pass out papers and write notes throughout the day.  I guess I’m a hog, because all of the top spots belong to me!

This is our kid closet.  We keep backpacks, coats, and recess toys in here.  The white sack holds shopping bags for students who forget backpacks.

One of my favorite spots in our room, our “listening closet.”  The kids love to squeeze in there together to listen to books.  It even comes with it’s own built in headphone storage. ;)

Our job chart and weather frog.  Each student has a bee with a number that sticks with Velcro to the job they pick.

We are required to have a focus wall in our county.  I have yet to feel completely happy with the way I design it.  CD pockets worked well for the big first grade vocabulary cards, but not so well for the little K cards that we demote to our word wall when we’re done.  I need to get another small blue pocket chart.  (My L and U fell off the wall today… I guess that’s a sign spring really is on it’s way!)

This is our whole group area and it’s the hub of our classroom.  We use the smartboard CONSTANTLY.  I don’t know how I ever taught without one.

Our “Today we will…” board is another piece that comes with teaching in my county.  We are required to write objectives using blooms taxonomy for each lesson and post it where it is visible for the kids.  I have a love hate relationship with this requirement.

This is our classroom library and another one of my favorite areas.  We keep books sorted by author and genre.  I do love that the K kids are MUCH better at keeping the library clean than my firsties were!  (I promise I didn’t clean for the picture!)

I need to get more bins, I used to buy mine at walmart but they stopped carrying them.  Ekkkkk!!!!   They are carrying stackable ones with handles that flip now instead.  Does anyone know where you can still find the old ones?

*UPDATE*  I've had questions about where my library labels came from.  I made them myself and you can get them from my TPT store here.

 This is our centers area.  We have five main stations, one for each domain (phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency).  Each center has a tub with folders that correspond to a table.  They get their own buckets (each bucket has multiple folders because we are required to differentiate each domain for 3 levels) and folders at the beginning and are wonderfully independent.  One of the biggest helpers are the folders I make and bind together each year.  I buy wax coated folders at Walmart during back to school.  This year I found them for 1 cent each (they are usually 10 cents).  I then bind five of them together, with a heavy duty page protector on the front (that holds their center contract), using a comb binding machine.  This makes it so easy for them to keep track of their work since everything is color coded (center buckets, tables, folders, etc.)

This is our cool down station.  Kids go to this desk to fill out a reflection log if they change their color twice.  I find that looking out the window helps students cool down faster. (This picture makes it look like we have a beach outside our classroom... unfortunately we don't.  That's the K playground.)

These are our cubbies.  As you can see we have a ton of workbooks.  We rarely use any of them.  If students finish all of their centers for the week one of their choices is to get out their reading workbook, this is really the only time we use them.  I don’t know why our district spends so much money on them.

 Aren't these faces super cute?  We make them the first day of school.  I pass them every day on my way out of my room and they make me smile so much that I leave them up all year.