Monday Made It

It has been a few weeks since I participated in Tara's Monday Made it, mostly because it seems like my "made its" have been huge FAILS!  I tried making a cute home made sign that I have been wanting for like forever...well needless to say, my sign making sills are greatly lacking!  Anyway, on to this week's made its.

I decided to give a go at making some decor for my classroom.  I am very pleased with the way it turned out!  I love the bright colors and I think my students will like them too.  I know my room needs to be student friendly, but I also spend most of my life in that room during the school year.  Since third grade is such a huge transition for the kids from primary to intermediate grades I try to have my room be fun but with a bit of sophistication and I think this decor pack achieves that.  Take a look at my TPT store here.  It will be on sale all day today!  

Sorry no pics for this one.  This project was such a mess I forgot to get the camera out!

My classroom library has been my nemesis!  I have struggled for the past 10 years with how to organize it and keep it organized through the year!  I have had it by author's last name for the last 6 years of third grade.  While it is not the best, it has worked  and it was way too overwhelming for me to try to redo the whole thing.  At the end of the school year it became quite apparent to me that my library needed a little TLC.  Some of the books were falling apart and needed repair and others just needed to go.  Soooo.....I boxed the whole library up and carted it home.  As I was repairing books I decided this was the perfect time to reorganize the whole thing.  I did not want too many subgroups as I feel that just becomes too complicated and let's just be honest, third graders are never going to keep it organized anyway!  I decided on fiction, non-fiction, picture books, and series books.  I don't know if this will work or not, but I hope my students are able to find books that fit their needs easily.  

How do you organize your classroom library?  How do you help students keep it organized throughout the year in a way that is easy and requires little time from you?  Any helpful tips or ideas?  

Summer is flying by waaaayyy too fast, I will be in my classroom before I know it.  I hope you all are enjoying your break...head on over to see some other great Made Its!

Nicole

Starting the Year...

Just like most teachers out there I use the summer to plan, plan, plan.  Always looking for fun and exciting ways to start the new school year, I decided my old tried and true activities were a bit....boring!  I have done the make a quilt square about yourself activity, make a tshirt to tell about yourself activity, draw your summer in the sunglasses activity...and many many others.  While I think these are pretty fun, my students do not!  That is not the foot I want to get off on.  So I decided to think of things kids are "in to".  I teach third graders and many of them are getting their first cell phones and the ones that do not yet have phones are anxiously awaiting the day their parents cave in :)  I decided it would be fun to have them draw a "sellfie" showing important things they would like their new teacher and new classmates to know about them.  Always the literacy teacher, the students will also write clues about themselves.  Starting pretty ambiguously at first and becoming more and more detailed.  I will collect the selfies and clues and read them to the class.  The student's classmates will guess who the selfie belongs to based on the clues the student gave.  I have done something similar to the clues idea before and the kids LOVE it!

We then have a parent "curriculum night" about two weeks into the school year where I meet with the parents and tell them everything their child will learn in third grade (hahaha), I am thinking these selfies and paragraphs would be a great bulletin board to get us started and I can then have something fun and academic for when the parents come.  If you would like this idea and would like to pick it up, visit my tpt store here.

What kind of fun things do you do with your class to start the year?

Nicole