Getting closer - Summer room preparations in 1st grade

About two and a half weeks until I report back to school. I've been into my classroom whenever I've been kid-free. Thank goodness for my hubby and my mom and mother-in-law.

Here are some pics of the progress I've made. 

I made this word wall. Last year my word wall took up a whole bulletin board so this year I decided to combine my Saxon Phonics pictures with my word wall. My Saxon posters were getting pretty shabby so I made new ones. Same pictures just new images. I put them on these polka dot dessert plates. I think they are super cute!

On my other displays, I bought a rainbow chevron theme set. Very cute and a wide variety of things to use.

I'm not sure the dollar store ribbon I used is going to hold up but it's good for now. 

On the writing one I will put up strategies as I teach them. The reading one I will put up Deanna Jump's animals that have reading strategies on them. Math is for calendar time as well as math terms we will learn. The proud pandas board is the magnet board. I'm going to display student work there. Each classroom has an animal theme. Mine is the pandas. I have always loved pandas! I decided to go with a black and white with some primary accents for my theme. 

The shelf under the math board is for centers. The crates on the left are holding our morning meeting binders. I got ideas from Kim Adsit's Calander Notebook but made my own. We also do a poem each day which is also in the binder. Last year we kept the binders in our desks but I think this year we're going to keep them near the carpet.

Under these are metal shelves. The pocket charts and posters are hung with loose leaf rings and hide my junk pretty well. The blue and yellow one is for classroom jobs. The rainbow one I will put the phonics sound picture cards as we learn them. The black one is a lost tooth graph by month The red one is a who can tie your shoes board. The white one is a fiction vs. nonfiction T chart. The blue pocket chart is for center rotation. And finally on the end is a long 2 column chart. I had originally bought that for preschool for a question of the day but now I'm using it for reading levels of self-selected books.

This area is where my reading centers happen thus the pocket charts. The frog on the wall is my code toad. For each spelling list I made it in code so they can practice. I think I'm going to use a bucket shelf and use the spelling activities in it for early finishers and for extra time but I haven't gotten to know hat yet! My sons each have bucket shelves and I'm trying to decide which one to steal to take to school! My gecko, Charlie's cage is over there too because of the outlet. I sat the cage on an old piano bench that I painted black.

Before I went home, I wanted this counter cleaned off. I bought several new plants. Makes it look homey and replenishes our oxygen!

So it's ready for open house which is on the first day of institute--ugh! Under all those curtains I need to go through the shelves but I'm hoping for a little time between meetings during those 3 days. I told myself I'm not going back until the 12th. Still much to do for school at home though!

I'm diving head first into 1st Grade!

Hello! Welcome to Headfirst! I am a first grade teacher in a small town in Illinois. I am getting ready to start my 2nd year teaching first grade at my current school. I am an early childhood teacher and have worked mostly in preschool but also in kindergarten and first grade previously. I love the little ones! 

I am starting this blog to share my journey with others but also as a sort of teacher diary for myself! I find it so fun to look back at photos, lesson plans, and teaching memorabilia from my past. My plan is to chronicle things that I create and/or use in my classroom and my obsession with organization!

I am not a bragger, but I am the hardest working teacher I know. I think about school every day. It is July 3. We got out of school May 29 and I have worked on school every day since! I am certainly not complaining. I love teaching! My favorite quote is this: 

In my personal life, I am married to my high school sweetheart and have three sons. 

Being a mommy is awesome but challenging! Two of my children struggle with ADHD. As challenging as it is to be a mom of children with this condition, my experience with it has been so valuable when working with children who also struggle keeping their focus. I am very open to talking to families about my experiences as both a parent and a teacher. In addition to ADHD, my youngest son has some autistic-like tendencies. He was tested and at that time was not considered to be on the spectrum but he struggles with social skills much like high-functioning autistic children. He attended special education from preschool through first grade. In second grade, we moved them all to a small parochial school. What an awesome place! He is still struggling academically, but we are able to retain him (which I wanted to do from the beginning). So a second year in second grade we're hoping will help him. So now I'll have experience in retaining my own child. My middle son's birthday was right on the cutoff date so we sent him to preschool an additional year and started kindergarten a year late. What a great decision that was! All of these experiences have helped me so much when making decisions about kids and when helping parents make decisions about their children.

This last year, I moved from preschool to first grade three days before school started! One of the first grade teachers got a job closer to home which left an opening. I felt it was time for a change, so I jumped at the opportunity. Such a great decision! I have an awesome team of 4 other first grade teachers to work with. Two are veterans, two were second-year teachers this past year, and then there is me who has a total of 10 years of teaching experience. I won't deny, it was a really tough year for me. I really like to plan ahead, and instead of that, I was just trying to keep my head above water last year! I was so lucky to have the veterans to help me through it! I really did not like feeling like I was dragging them down (of course they never made me feel that way!). So I couldn't wait to get started this summer to get my act together! 

I like to plan out the whole year in advance. In preschool this was easy because you are constantly teaching the same things over and over, just with different themes. In first grade, it can be done to a certain extent. So my first order of business was getting my crates in order. Last year, I just threw stuff that we had done in a crate until it was full and then started a new one. I ended up with 10 crates that looked like this. Yikes!

So to get things organized, I ordered some extra capacity hanging file folders from Amazon and started putting them in the crates.

So then I had to get my year planned out. I started with a blank calendar in Microsoft Word and put in all the holidays and breaks. Then I numbered my weeks. I have a file folder for each week. Then I mapped out what themes we did last year for each week. My team plans together and really tries to stick together, especially in our phonics and math curricula. We all do the same themes but teach them the way we want to. Since this will only be my second year working with this team, I didn't want to put anything in stone in case they wanted to switch things up for the coming year. So I did it all in pencil! We are meeting periodically during the summer to do some planning so I'll make changes as I need to. I shared my calendar with my team and they were happy to use it as a starting place. Here are pictures of my calendar after we tweaked it as a team and added our phonics and math lessons and my lesson planning form.

After I made a rough draft plan for the year (mostly holidays and theme teaching), I started going through each of the crates, putting the materials in the appropriate week folder. That took me about two weeks--less time than I thought it would! Since then,  I have been making and laminating new materials (thank you teachers pay teachers) and putting them in the crates.

I'll leave it there for now. I have lots more to do this summer! 43 days left!