Classroom Digs!

I am sure so many of you were on the edge of your seat waiting for NYC pics, but you will just have to wait another day or so, I need some time to sort through everything. The mister thinks I came home with PTSD from the trip, and perhaps I did so I think a few days of clearing my mind will hopefully make the post a more positive outlook on the trip.

Today I am changing gears and going to give you a little classroom tour. I am blessed to still have five days before we start our teacher in service and eleven days until students arrive but I know that time is slipping away very very quickly. 

I should add that I can imagine that this post is going to a big picture dump and probably an even bigger word dump. I always feel better if I offer a disclaimer, but lets be honest I go by the babbling box, you should expect word vomit on the regular. 

Even though it is Wednesday I am choosing to use Tuesday's topic, always the rule breaker!

While I will always think my classroom is a work in progress and I still have a few to do's left to check off my list next week, but I am very happy with my digs.

So without further to do:
welcome to my home away from home.

This is the view from my hallway, I am the only teacher on my hallway so its pretty much up to me how the hallway looks which is lovely. I also try really hard to make it clear my subjects and name because students rarely know if they are in the right place.

I have hopes to cover more of the door with quotes but the pesky laminator has been missing most of the summer.

Right inside the doorway I have a book shelf where our raffle jars and magazine holders stay with any handouts and such the students will need. I like having them right by the door because I always open the door when students leave at the end of the period and I can quickly switch out each periods jar/handouts. 

My door always stays closed and locked, its a safety issue at our school and it also prevents students from walking out of my room because they can't just come back in. Some people might disagree with this strategy but for 90% of the time it works. 

Right inside my door, on the left hand side is the school wide tardy policy and sign in sheet. I try to not make the whole class focus on kids signing in so I keep it far away from the main classroom area. On the left hand side is the bookcase from the first collage. 

Please ignore the ugly purple wall, not sure why someone decided to half paint the wall purple and just quit. Including leaving the painters tape. Perhaps one summer I will repaint it.

The view from the door is just the teacher desk and of course my exit door. I love having the back door to the teachers parking lot, probably makes me antisocial but whatever. 

One of my favorite items in the room are the curtains over the back door: dollar general finds! I do need to hang some sort of contact paper on the window for safety issue and due to the heat that comes through the door but they are super cute. 

I am blessed to have tons of storage, and if I was honest I would say it wasn't enough but the whole back wall of the classroom are just storage cabinets. We have tons and tons and tons of supplies for each class, you can be envious until next May when I have to enter each item into the inventory sheet. 

Hatred doesn't describe it.

Also near the door I have a What Do I Do Now wall for students to check out if they finish an assignment early. I feel like the fun police sometimes but I don't allow free time if you finish early.

Next up is my desk area.

I like that I have a clearly defined space that is my area. 

Students do not stand behind or go behind my desk just like I would never go into their things. For us its all about teaching boundaries and respect. 

On the corner of my desk is a turn in basket that I use for all of my classes, students have to pass it on the way out the door so it works well to keep students in their seats until I dismiss them and prevents students leaving work at their stations. I simply collect the papers and either put them in a folder to grade or if it is ongoing work it moves to the blue hanging folders for the next day.

Behind my desk is a white board that I would never have been able to access: it is hung oddly high even for me and it is covered by furniture. I turned it into our info board: daily schedule, the NOISE signs, the date, important numbers, the weekly worksheets are hung for administrators to be able to access and I like to cover the final part with sweet notes and drawing from the students.

The view from my desk makes my heart pitter patter. I wish I had pictures from the way the room looked when I first arrived to begin teaching, it would probably make you cry like I did. Now there isn't a piece of furniture in my room that I didn't place where it would be best.

There is never an opportunity for a student to hide, hurt another student or goof off because I can see all 30 chairs at one time.

I have two big metal cabinets filled with more legos straight down the middle of the room, this gives me a nice demo table and makes for easy clean up at the end of a period.

In front of table is my teacher cart with my wireless keyboard and mouse and brand new stool. My plan is to teach from there this year and not sit on the work bench. I also keep my numbered sticks to call on students, pink box full of raffle tickets and prizes and an extra bucket for found legos. It's all about having a place for everything.

Next is my classroom or student expectation wall. I will spend the first week of school reviewing each expectation with the students and constantly refer back to it. It's big, it's bold and it's bright pretty much how I feel about classroom expectations.

I just received my new vistaprint posters for the next part of the wall so it will have to wait until next Monday.

The final section of the wall was my baby this summer. My administration requires our TEKS, objectives, essential questions and vocabulary posted. I teach three preps so I found this task daunting and pretty much ignored it, rule breaker. To be fair all of this can be found on the students worksheets on the computers but the admin still knocked me on weekly observations for this.

So I spent some time planning how I wanted this new section of my wall to look, it needed to be three sections and easily changeable each week.

Ta Da!

My plan is to use the school poster maker each week to make a large visual of all that my admin requires and use the clothespins to hang them up.

On the far back wall there is Technology in Action for student created work. Right now I have some of my best student work from last year in hopes I get students excited about what we will be creating and doing in my room. Less schedule changes hopefully!

On the other side of my large projection screen is my word wall. I had so many comments not to change it and I really wasn't going to. All I wanted to do was replace the sign with my vistaprint sign and I ended up tearing my original word wall. The joys of using dollar store table clothes.

So here is my revised word wall. I once again used clothespins to make changing out words super easy.

On the other side of the word wall is a second Technology In Action wall for more student work.

My final real bulletin is a What Inspires Us wall where I have different college and career information posted. I also have a Banish I Don't Know sign with different sentence stems hanging but I don't have any close ups of that.

My last pictures are just close ups of the student workstations. To say I am label happy might be an understatement. 

Each chair is labeled to match the computer number. I am only allotted 25 rolling chairs because CTE says my class limit is 25 but my campus says its how many computers I have. So five students get hard chairs...that is always a touchy issue.

Each workstation is made up of two students so partners are already set, I am evil what can I say.

Each workstation has a clean up checklist with a picture of how the workstation should look posted. This makes clean up super easy because there is no guessing involved whatsoever.

I also have cabinets at 10 of my workstations which are also labeled with a how they should look before they are locked back up. Excuse my ghetto locks it was the best I could come up with.

In my career tech class each workstation is a different module that does something different for example early childhood has a fake baby to take care of but engineering bridges is building a bridge to destroy. My admin does not understand why 12 groups of students are doing 12 different things so I simply printed the objectives for each module and posted it with an example for the students to see what it looks like to do partner work. I am also thinking this will also be helpful on back to school night.

Whew!!!

I warned you this would be long. I have a few more things to show you but those are the work in progress items which will hopefully be ready to go for Made it Monday.

If you are interested in any of my signs I am happy to share, just let me know, it would be your prize for surviving a very very lengthy post!

Also I am linking up with Shana.

- The Babbling Box!