Week one: Check!

This week was wonderful! I love my new class, I love the changes I have made to my teaching style after being GLAD trained, and I am just plain excited for this school year! The first page of my Parent Handbook included a page about me which explained that I will be getting married this year, that my last name will change at Spring Break, and why we have a pirate theme in our classroom. My students are so excited for all of the upcoming changes and to be pirates! They ask me questions about my fiancé and wedding daily! Yesterday one of my students asked me if I could bring him in for show and tell :) 

Would you like to see some before and after pictures. I got a new phone between my befores and afters so the lighting looks so much better in the afters...which makes the after pictures look that much better I guess :)

Before: as you enter my classroom

After

Before: looking toward the back of my classroom

 After

 Before: Looking toward the from of my room from the back of my room

After: these black bins will soon be labeled and will hold Welcome Work with task cards and manipulatives. I am working on these this weekend. I will be posting them each month on my TPT store.

After

After: teacher space behind my desk

After

After: our gathering space and where I do most of my direct instruction this year

After: Calendar Math--I am doing all of my Calendar Math on the SmartBoard this year, partly because if you notice in my pictures we have VERY little wall space! I like to put up student work on the walls so taking up that space with a lot of calendar stuff really made my room look, I dunno, not student-centered. So I have the main calendar stuff up (calendar, money and time) the rest of the stuff my students will see when we do calendar math on the SmartBoard. They also have a Calendar Math Workbook that we will start next week. 

After: This was taken just before Open House

After: Parents received a Parent Handbook, a checklist, Transportation form, Classroom Volunteer Form, and Student information form. All except the Parent Handbook were included in my TPT Open House Packet

Students received my First day of School Poem and the goodie back to match!

These were a HIT! Students were wearing the stickers the next day, they brought back the erasers, one student even kept the life saver in his pocket for the first day of school :) So cute!

Birthday Surprise! About 30 minutes before Open House started my wonderful mom showed up to surprise me with balloons and cake! A complete surprise! And what a thoughtful, yummy surprise it was! I forgot to take a picture of the cake before we quickly began cutting and putting cake on plates, but it was very cute (Tinkerbell chocolate cake) and very yummy! My students from last year who came to visit me got to take a piece for not forgetting me :) 

My mom even found a super cool pirate balloon!!! I need to carefully deflate it and hang it up in my room somewhere special.

When I finished my room and was taking pictures I was in love with it, but now looking at the pictures I feel like it is so boring! I need to do an art project this week and bring some excitement to my room! I also need to bring more pirate to my room!

This will eventually have pictures of my students on the ship looking eager to be in 2nd grade and excited to be on a pirate ship :) I found a pirate ship image in google images I liked, projected it onto my white board, taped up some white butcher paper, and traced :) I learned that little trick at my GLAD training this year! What a great tip!!!! Makes me look like a real artist, huh?!

So, we are off to a great start! 

Any pirate themed art project ideas???