Classroom Organization

This cabinet near the phone holds the parent contact binder, behavior binder (mentioned in a later picture) and poetry books. Inside the cabinet holds all the monthly decorations for the room.

Next to the phone is the calendar, pencils (DULL AND SHARP) and anything else that I may need in a moments notice like the names jar or overhead markers. The flower pots are plastic and I got them at Walmart.

In the front of the room I keep the non fiction selections. This project took a lot of time. The green baskets are Science topics, the yellow baskets are Social Studies topics, and the blue baskets are Math. (I ran out of yellow baskets so one of the blue ones are the If You Lived ... books. Once I separated the books into topics, I took a basket home a night and leveled all the books (using sites such as http://www.lexile.com/ and www.scholastic.com/bookwizard and sometimes the Fountas and Pinnell book leveling site (paid membership site). I leveled each book by DRA level, Lexile level, and Grade level equivilent. I also included the genre. I wrote the information on the cover of the book as well as put stickers on the front. Picture to follow, I just thought about that as I am explaining. Pictures help....

Here is a close up of the baskets. I downloaded these from Beth Newingham's site. One of my favorites!!!!

This is my behavior chart. All students begin on green each day. When they don't follow the classroom rules, they take a point. The second color is yellow and then comes pink and red follows. At the end of the day, I record the color they received for the day. At the end of each month, our school celebrates the students who are model citizens. This makes it easy to see and keep track of. I'll include a pic of the recording sheet I use. It is from http://www.teachersclubhouse.com/ .

This is the guided reading area. Everything I need is at my fingertips. Behind my chair are 3 plastic containers where I keep each groups materials. I also keep index cards, markers, dry erase boards, pencils, highlighters, and leveled text within an arms reach to save precious teaching time.

This was a new find. Christmas Tree Shop had these planter boxes. I thought that this would make a great place to keep the leveled fluency binders. Each student knows which binder to go in when it is their time for the fluency center. I just hot glued black polka dot letters to the outside. It fits nicely on the inside window ledge when we are not doing centers. I made a second one for the diffentiated word work.

 This area has been in transition all year. I have an ELMO and it can only go in the fron because that is where my overhead screen is. Limited, I know... anyways, I also have limited outlets. So, I had an overhead cart for a while and that had to go because my short little cutie patooties couldn't see over the cart. So then I just used the little table in front. That was great they could see, but I had to sit in a tiny chair and hunch over to write.... that was not good for my back. So, I decided to movve my file cabinet in front of the table... perfect height... then I just plop down on the table when I need to sit. PHEW... I think it may finally work... and the cords hide under the table... another problem I dislike... visible cords!!

Ok, back to the leveled books. This is a smaller corner in the back of the room. This is where I have all the other genres. They too are leveled the same way. The books in the purple baskets are leveled according to Fountas and Pinell and the students know exactly what levels they can read during independent reading. I also have favorite authors in brown baskets and biographies in red baskets.

I know this picture is dark, for some reason the flash on the camera was not flashing!!!! This is the whole group area. The shelves under the window hold the kids folders and notebooks. I don't let them keep anything in the desks except textbbooks. Voila... no mess... no papers sticking out... no desk dumping!!!! Ahhhh....

My desk. The hideous computer is gone and now I have this lovely little laptop! More space on my desk.... Yeah...