Back to School

I've been super busy this week trying to set up my classroom.  I've spent about 12 hours this past week trying to set up my room.  I've been making many changes to my room this year, this is my second year in first grade and I know how I want certain things.  My first change was getting rid of my tables for desks.  I've set up a project on www.DonorsChoose.org for stability ball chairs.  When thinking about using stability ball chairs in place of normal chairs, I knew that I would be losing storage space, I made pocket chairs to hold their notebook & pencil boxes.  I cannot wait to see how having stability ball chairs in my classroom will help my students focus better.  I had a couple of my students sit on some for a couple of minutes and could not believe that they could sit so quietly and read!  I have also changed the way that I am organizing my student book shelf.  I purchased bins and have organized most of their books based on the reading level of each book.  This has taken a long time to do.  This should make it easier for my students to choose books on their level to put in their book bins for silent reading.  Hopefully I will be posting some pictures of my classroom next week.

I have also been working on some items to put in my teacherspayteachers store.  I've been creating a syllable sorting activity for each month.  It has taken a long time to find clip art that I liked and would fit with each theme that I was working with.  Here is the link to one of them, this one is a freebie in my store Animal Syllable Sort.  I currently have four syllable sort activities finished and listed in my store, sorry but only the Animal Syllable Sort is free.

I am going to try and enjoy my last week of Summer Vacation, I have a week of mandatory work days that start the 19th.

Amber