One Month Later . . . .

One month later ----
     Actually it has been almost 5 weeks of school and since the last time I blogged. Sorry about the long absence. You all know what happens. You've been there too.
    I have slowly been getting my room set up and even though it is not "done". I decided to show you my progress.

   I started my Chinese/Asian Art unit so I placed my "decorations" in front of my west windows. Kind of fun!

I purchased two stones for my drip dry station. I usually do most of the cleaning of the brushes, water cups in the primary grades then lay them out to drip dry. I hate using tons of paper towels to dry. Before  always had flat stones, but our local nursery didn't have any left  this late in the year.
You also can see the sponge bucket. I wet down the sponges and give each table two. They can clean off the glue or paint on their fingers, then the tables. This also saves on paper towels. Have you ever seen how wet a 1st grader can get a table? Then they have to dry it, and dry it and dry and dry. Whew you get the idea.

These are my scissor blocks. One for each table. I assign one person at each table to go get them and be responsible to take them back at clean up time.  Same for the glue bottles, that we stand up like soldiers.

All of my labels are almost done. Since I have been rearranging things to suit me I waited a while to do this. These are the 6 cabinets with shelves that I use to store class folders in. I have a paper box for each class and usually all of their work will fit inside it.

This is the front of my room. I have my classroom discipline bulletin board with the "Stick to the Rules" poster. Then my white board has my "I can ...." statements. We are asked to write in "student friendly" terms what our learning objective or goal is for each class. It isn't hard to think of things to write but sometimes I forget to write the new ones on the board every 6 days. Please ignore the bags and bags of recycling on the floor. Ask and you shall receive!

I read "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" with my first grades last week. Then we drew the mouse and some items we could remember from the story. This week we started our mouse collage/puppets. I won't say they are puppets really since so many of them accidentally glued them shut or upside down. But the year is young and we will get better!

 The 2nd grades did paintings in the same style as the Ancient Chinese using just black to create different values. Fun. We went step by step together for the foreground. Then I showed them a few ideas for the middle and backgrounds. We loved doing this. They tried so hard to just use water and a tiny dot of black. Or blending with water to make lighter values of black.
These are just a couple from the first class after our second day when we made pandas to add to our landscape. Next week we make a frame! Yeah.
I am having so much fun with my new students. Maybe I will be able to stop once in a while to blog more.


Peace-