I'm back again this week for Five for Friday! It has been a short week for us finished off with a field trip today and boy, am I tired! I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five For Friday this week...so here we go!
So I am someone who likes change - like things on the walls and furniture kind of change. This is my third year of teaching and I've been in the same classroom all three years. My room setup has been pretty much the same for those three years. Back in January I started thinking about how I wanted to move furniture in my room and move stuff around NEXT school year. I convinced myself I needed to wait as it was going to be too much work to move stuff for the second half of the school year. Well, I am also a person that when I get something on the brain, I can't forget about it. So about once a week since January I've been trying to move my student tables to get some sense of change, but never found an arrangement I liked. So....last Wednesday I got to seriously thinking about moving all of my furniture and when I came back to my room during my carpool planning afternoon, I took the plunge and worked for an hour moving stuff. Came back the next morning and moved more stuff and waited to see my kids reactions when they came in - they were stunned and are still walking all over the room because their little bodies are used to going to the back corner to turn papers in and it is now on the opposite side of the room at the front. Below are pictures from before...circa last July before our open house and after...finally taken today.
Before:
And after...I am in love with it! The {tiny} room seems so much bigger with pretty much the same furniture just rearranged! Still working on getting it just like I like it and trying to finish building more cubbie bookshelves that I finally received yesterday.
Arrays galore! We have been studying arrays this week in math and the kids are excited to know that this is getting them ready to learn multiplication next year. If only we can learn what a row is...
We used Soaring Through 2nd Grade's new arrays pack during Work with Teacher some this week. We were building arrays from the repeated addition sentence and the kids loved it! If they didn't finish during Work With Teacher, they wanted to come back and finish after they finished their math journal, so I had a table full of kids sitting and standing at one point working on their arrays! Love it!
I won an art field trip for my class! Whoop whoop! We have a parent at our school who was offering art field trips to the first 3 teachers who emailed her, each trip valued at $175. It will be an in class field trip and I am excited to surprise my kiddos with this after our end of year assessments which begin this week!
I finally got around to finishing my first set of themed/monthly math centers - baseball themed, perfect for May. Can't wait for my kiddos to start using them next week! Now I can start thinking about making sets for next school year - already have ideas for October, but need to come up with July/August and September first! Those will definitely be a review of a lot of first grade concepts since it is the beginning of the year!
Head over to my TPT store to check out the centers!
We had our 2nd (and last) field trip of the school year today to the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. Because we are a charter school, field trips at our school are a little different...meaning that we have almost as many chaperones as we do students. The woman at the front desk couldn't believe it when we told her we had close to 80 chaperones! And we only have 92 students in our grade level! It makes field trips so much less stressful for us! We toured the museum for about 2 1/2 hours and then went to see the 3D movie, The Last Reef, in the WRAL 3D Movie Theater at the museum. It was a good movie, but after walking around the museum...I think half of us fell asleep...soothing music and nice calm voice of the narrator meant I nodded off as did some of my kiddos and my bestie beside me too! If I hadn't had my students beside me asking me questions throughout, I might have really nodded off to la-la land!
Here are some pictures from our field trip adventures today!
My silly kiddos!
Bestie and me with our one of our other team mate's granddaughter!
I'll leave you with a couple pics of my rotten kitties enjoying our sunroom earlier this week!
Have a great weekend!!