Room Set-Up for the First Day

I'm hard at work this weekend, planning, reflecting and creating items! Thus far, the school year has gotten off to a good, if stressful and jam-packed, start. Our room was organized(ish) for the first day:

Our "I can..." statements on my homemade whiteboard! At some point, I'll blog
about how I made this but suffice it to say that it cost me, in total, about $25.

The "front" of our room. Our "CAFE" (Reading strategies) and
"VOICES" (writing strategies) were free printables from Ladybug'sTeacher Files.
She is amazing! We use a bunch of her adorable printables in our room for labeling
and organization.

We use these sentence frames to promote high order thinking
(Bloom's Taxonomy). As we teach them, we also encourage
the students to use the questions with each other.

Underneath our sentence frames, we post the vocabulary for
each unit under each subject so that the students can use them
for easy reference. Old words will be written into a dictionary
for each table group to keep on hand. We plan to continue
"Vocabulary Maniacs," a vocab using incentive chart, again,
this year.

More front of the room!

Student mailboxes as students enter. My co-teacher
found the idea for movable name labels (binder clips) on Pinterest
and it linked to this blog.

I'm sure this has been done before but, while
my co-teacher and I were shopping last year, we
found this lime green shoe holder at Five
Below and, though we didn't have a use for
it, it was only $5 so we bought it to go with
our room. We took the kids photos, velcroed
them onto the colored squares and attached
these to cardboard sticks we had. Then, the
kids can move themselves through the
writing process as they go. It's a great way
to formatively assess where students are. It
allows us to group students based on need
so that we can have guided writing groups.

Another cozy reading spot! Big lots had bean bags for $17!