Classroom Preparation

This past week has been a whirlwind of classroom preparations! I have been accumulating ideas from past teachers and classrooms I have seen and from Pinterest, and this past week they all had to come to fruition.

I have to admit, I underestimated how much time it takes to create absolutely every last thing from scratch. I have to say, I was pretty adamant about not dumping a lot of my personal money into my classroom before the year began. I have heard time and time again that it is all about "progression... not perfection" and that it is easy to drop hundreds of dollars as a first year teacher on things that can easily wait a few weeks once you get your hands on your budget/PTO money. So, I have been patient in buying things (partially with no choice... being a relative newlywed, money is definitely not at my disposal yet).

I had to pretty much print, cut out, laminate, cut out again, and assemble everything myself! And it has paid off! I think it looks pretty dandy. Nowhere near perfect, but it is a work in progress to add to throughout the year. I chose a sort of ice cream theme for a few things because the former teacher had left the national standards of music written on ice cream cones across the front of the room, so I took that and made a big national standard ice cream bowl outside my classroom in the front main hallway.

To the left of this bulletin board, I created a Twitter board in honor of the new Twitter account I developed for my music classroom. I plan on writing announcements and questions on the whiteboard for students to tweet about!

Below the Twitter board, I have "Today's Scoop" where I will write a brief description or summary of the skills we will be focusing on in that given grade level. It is a way to keep people just passing by my room in the loop on what we are studying!

I am also excited to have printed off and laboriously laminated my very own word wall!! This is something I took from my wonderful cooperating teacher Sarah Hassler. It is a way for children to see movement vocabulary right in front of them during movement exploration and improvisation so they have that safety net of never feeling at a loss for what to do. I divided my locomotor words up on either side of the non-locomotor words, dividing them according to one side being smooth locomotor and the other being sharp locomotor! :)

On the left side of this word wall is my main whiteboard. On the other side of the whiteboard, I have my class norms posted, as well as a place with room for exit slips. I call it my "What STUCK with you today?" section, and the students will place sticky notes with their thoughts on what they did successfully or need improvement on for the next time.

So that is basically what I have done in my classroom. I also made some adorable tissue paper pom poms to hang from my ceiling because they are incredibly high. I didn't get a chance to take a picture of them today, but they are awesome, and I made 6 of them in the primary colors of the rainbow (ROYGBV) to match the class rules/norms! I will post a pic soon.

Tomorrow begins my first teacher work day! Then, August 1 is the first student day! I am so excited and nervous, but I know that I am where I am supposed to be, and I am eager for God to use me this year! We shall see what this week has in store, I will see you on the other side! :)