I am definitely looking forward to the three day weekend after the first few weeks of school, but I figured it was a good time to finally post about my classroom. This year our school has a "Wild about..." theme, but I have actually had this theme in my classroom for a few years now. It's exhausting (and expensive) to update an entire classroom so each year I try to add a little bit more to complete the look I'm going for. I don't know how much longer I'll be in the classroom since I do have my special ed master and my educational diagnostician certificate and would like to get a diag job within these next few years. I just don't think it's sensible to put a lot of money into completely changing my classroom theme if I won't be in a classroom too much longer. Anyway, I'm getting off subject here. I spent the summer painting 4 shelves that were actually looking pretty ratty. I painted them a matte black and they came out quite nice.
I completely changed my teacher desk, small group table, classroom library, and desks arrangement. I decided to go with earth tone colors so my bulletin boards are either black with zebra print border or brown with leopard print boarder. Last year I had no time to put up nice bulletin boards so I'm really liking how they turned out. My homeroom class has 22 students. It's a big group so my previous arrangements wouldn't have worked. To make a little more room, I have 3 table groups of 6 desks each and then one row of 4 in the back. Although my firsties are little, space is tight, but we're making it work. I decided to zip tie the desks together to stop the migrating desks across the room.
This year is the first year that I'll be team teaching in 1st grade. Personally, I like to be self contained better, but the teacher I'm working with is someone who I've gotten to know these past few years and we seem to be working really well together. Her homeroom is the ESL group. All of the ESL students for 1st grade are in this class. There are 15 in the class so it's a nice size group. I've got a lot of different and interesting personalities in that group! We like to be silly and they are all very curious. They are talkative, but in a good way. I don't mind a loud classroom as long as they're learning! My bilingual group is my homeroom and I have 22 students in that group. My daughter is actually one of them! I suppose it's a good thing that I'm teaming this year so that she isn't with me the entire day. We get a break from each other! This group has been together since pre-k and they will continue together through the bilingual program so they've gotten quite comfortable with each other. They are also talkative, but sometimes it isn't about what our lesson is pertaining to so it's been a bit more of a challenge to train them, but we are getting there.
I hope your first few weeks at school have gone as great as mine. It's hard getting used to waking up and actually getting dressed in the morning even after 8 years, but I'm glad to be getting back to a routine. I've actually started incorporating a few things like RocksBox and Stitch Fix in my wardrobe to spruce up my outfits so it's actually made it fun to get up and get dressed in the morning! If you'd like to look at me pretend to be a fashionista, head on over to my instagram page here!
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