This is how I keep track of where my students are during the course of the day. I started this last year because so many kids were going to different places I had trouble remembering who was where. I always had to ask the kids... they always know! Much of the time too many were in the bathroom and some who should never be together in the bathroom.... so door destinations was born!

Since our theme for the year was Travel, everything in the room was based on "Travel" so I put the kiddos names on tickets and laminated them. The colored pieces of paper are laminated and hot glued to the door. They are all the possible places they could go in the building. Each location has either 2 or three pieces of Velcro... that lets the kiddos know how many are aloud to that location at one time. I use stop signs over the bathroom so that they know when they can go and when they can not. It works really well.

Our Social Studies curriculum for third grade is World Communities. In each unit we visit a different country. In August, I made this airplane to have in the hallway to greet the students. I am no artist and I definitely was not thinking of the size of the school laminator. So after I had colored the plane and outlined it in black, I sent it to our awesome art teacher to laminate, that way I could use it each year. But, low and behold, it was too large. I had to cut the plane into 5 pieces and then I use packing tape to put it back together....ugh. Then one on the first day of school, I took each of the kids pics and put them in the windows of the plane. They love looking at this everyday... even in January. As you can see, this plane has no pilot... I still have yet to my picture in there......

Well, I am new to this "blogging" thing so starting this has been quite the ride. I am currently a third grade teacher and a curriculum writer for my district. I have been writing the new curriculum for 4 years now. I know that seems like a long time to write currciulum but when you work on it for 6 hours every month and then for the month of July.... it really is not a lot of time that we have been writing. My team consists of two other amazing and inspiring teachers who have become extremely close friends.

If any of you have every written curriculum or are writing it now because of the new Common Core, you know how much work goes into it. I leave at the end of our sessions with "oatmeal brain". Everything is mush!

So here we sit, Saturday morning working on curriculum....
I must get back to helping "my girls" so I'll continue soon.....till then....