Ready or Not!! Pictures!!!!

Oh my I get to meet my new little friends tomorrow!  I am super excited, as when I met them at home visits and screenings they all seemed really sweet and they were all so cute!  As you recall from my last post, my room was still a disaster zone, but now it's in much better shape.  I can't say it's completely all the way finished and everything is as I planned, but it's close, and I will finish everything up this week after school.  Most everything is ready, it's mostly just some organizing of my files and teacher materials that is left.  I am planning to have my lovely husband come and hang a shelf for me to stash my ever growing collection of books.  My room is super small and has basically no storage-just one really small closet that is packed to the max with stuff!  Being a preschool teacher, I have a TON of "stuff"- manipulatives, art materials, sensory stuff-just lots and lots of "stuff" and with such a small space it's challenging to find a place for it all!  I also am trying to find a better way to organize and store all of my small group stuff.  The best I can come up with is putting things into zip loc bags, labeling, and storing in plastic tubs/containers.  If any of you have a better system PLEASE let me know!  Anyways, here are some updated pictures of my room taken on Friday.  Ignore all the junk on the tables and other randomness, as that was all put away before I left so everything is nice and picked up and ready for my kids! Not sure how easy it will be to post after I have the kids, as everything is so busy, especially with all the after school activities my OWN kids are involved in, but I will try to post as often as I can, and of course I will continue to blog stock all of you guys!

 

This is my clanedar wall and the yellow board to the left is our classroom helpers.  I just rotate the stars everyday.  Since I have such a small class I am able to give everyone a job everyday.  One of the jobs is actually "vacation" so that person doesn't do anything, but they are still on the job chart.  I will add a few more things to our calendar routine as the year goes on.  I will add numbers 1-10 and we will count backwards with the rocket pointer  and blast off.  I will also add 10-100 and skip count.








This is to the left of the Calendar wall.  Our little ancient computer(-right behind the computer is the block center, which faces our large group/calendar area).  The crayon pocket chart is used for my small groups.  The rest of this wall is basically my behavior managment and solution wall.  We use PBIS and the little snail " Pedro" is our mascot for PBIS.  During the first week we will talk about ways to be Safe, Responsible, and Respectful, and I will add their sentences to the board.  Also we use "Super Friends", so the rainbow strip under the Pedro board is where they place their Super Friend each day if they ear one.  We give them a super friend when we see them being nice, helping others ect... and then we have a Super Friend Party at the end of each month if we reach our monthely goal.





This is looking towards the door.  The cubbies in the back houses some of our art supplies.There is my loittle closet, and on the other side of the door is our sensory table.





This is our writing center.  Lots of writing materials.  On the shelf behind the writing center is our Math center.  Lots of puzzles, gears, stringing beads, counters ect..  I guess I didn't get a picture of it, but the shelf is full of fun stuff!



This is looking at the writing center from the Large group area.  Also you can see some of the Library/Listening Center.  The pocket charts on the wall hold the kids names right now.  I usually leave the names in one and put words that goe with our theme or lesson in the other so they can use them in the writing center.  You can also see our Super Star board.  The roap hanging is where I hand student work to dry and also display.  I have another one of these on the other side of the room.



This is the Library/listening center and two bulletin boards where I display student work..  Also you can kind of see the science center.





This is the Science Center.  I start out with discovery bottles, microscope and scale and change it out with our themes and seasons.



This is a view towards my desk.  Notice my new pocket chart stand that my dad made me!!  LOVE IT!!!  behind the pocket chart stand is our House Keeping/Dramatic Play center.  It is really small and I only allow three kids to play at once.  I really wish it was larger, but with the size of my room that's how it has to be. :(  The pocket chart stand does not belong there-that's just where it was when I took the picure.  It does at the front of the room.





Again another picture of my fabulous pocket chart stand.  The poem in the pocket chart is one that I found on Pinterest. So stinkin cute!



Here is my desk/teacher area.  As I said, it's not totally finished-notice the piles of stuff.  I have even more books that I need to find a home so I am going to have my husband come and hang up a shelf on one of the walls by me desk.  Also my file cabinet is a disaster, so hope to get that better organized soon also.



Can you see my desk? lol it's piled up in this picture, but I did manage to clean it all off before I left on Friday.  The beach ball is for Beach Balll Buddies.  The kids LOVED this last year so I decided to do it again.  I taped on pictures of all the kids, as well as myself, my associate, and other important people at school.  We will sit in a circle, find someone on the ball, say their name and roll the ball to them.  We repeat over and over and soon everyone knows everyones name!  They asked to play it all year, even tho they knew each other after the first week!



Needs to take a Chill Pill

Okay, so the last time I posted was the first day I was able to get back into my room and it was in shambles.  And here we are two weeks later and not much has changed.   Okay I guess it looks a little better, but I think I have really just shifted things from pile to pile and shuffled stuff around.   It's not that I haven't been working my booty off, because I have, I've just been doing things that you can't see.  Since I teach Prek I have to do a little thing called Home Visits.  Which means I have to personally go to each and everyone of my little darlings homes and, well, visit, and have the parents fill out tons of paperwork.  Which means I have to schedule these visits first, which sometimes means leaving message after message, dropping notes in the mail, and even visiting their home to set a up a time for a Home Visit.  In a perfect world this could easily happen in a few days, but as we all know we don't live in a perfect world so it doesn't take a few days.  It took two weeks to be exact.  And since I teach Prek, we also do a little thing called Screenings, which means I have to schedule all those appointments for Screenings.   And when do I set up those appointments for screenings?  If you said at their Home Visit then you are correct. Soooooooooo, I am officially finished with my Home Visits, Screening Day was today and my room is still a complete disaster.  And did I mention I am exhausted?  And that I we have Prof. Development scheduled for tomorrow and two days next week?  AND SCHOOL STARTS A WEEK FROM THIS MONDAY?????  And I am scared to open the closet door in my classroom because there is so much junk stuffed in there and I am afraid that things will come flying at my head?  And i haven't even started to think about writing any lesson plans, or getting things ready for orientation night??? And I can't find my camera, as it is lost somewhere in my classroom under one of those random piles of junk!   Can you tell that I am starting to get stressed????   You know things are getting craaazaaay when your 5 year old tell you that you need to take a chill pill. lol   So my plans for tomorrow are professional development meetings all morning, and then  digging thru piles until I at least find my camera, as my own kids start school Monday and my baby starts kindergarten and I have to have that camera!  And then maybe I can take a chill pill!

Distaster Zone!!!

So today was my first day back to my classroom and HELLO!!!  I kinda knew I would be walking into a disaster zone, as we are required to stack everything up so they can clean the floors but wow, what a mess,  I guess that's what I get since my butt was out of that door the minute school was out last year!  Anyways, after the initial shock of seeing the disaster zone (and the discovery of a bunch of dead flies all over) I jumped right in and got BIZZY!!!  I worked my booty off ALL day and now I'm just beat!  Thank goodness my wonderful husband is cooking supper :)  Here are some pictures I took of the disaster zone.  Notice how teeny tiny my room is!  When I first moved into this room I was like, how the heck is this gonna work, but then after realizing I would only be allowed to have 11 students due to the small space I was like maybe this will work out just fine!  Especially since all the other prek rooms in my building have 17 students each!  HeeHee!  I have had to be very creative with the layout of my space, but in the end it all works out!  Oh and I was so ready to get the heck outta there today, I totally forgot to take after pictures of all my hard work!  I will be going back tomorrow so I will post then!  Yay for getting ready for Back to School!!!

Disaster Zone!!!!

Here is a bunch of stuff all piled up-What a mess!

Things starting to look a little better,  Still a long way to go!

Even better (at least this little area is looking better, kind of!  This is how it looked when I left to eat lunch.  I went back and did some more but forgot to take pictures.  I will go back tomorrow and hopefully get most everything in order, then I can start on the walls!  Yay!