Shopping!

As I mentioned in my first post, one thing I have done this summer is some serious classroom shopping.  I had quite a bit of classroom money to spend before the year was up that I didn't even find out about until the last few days of school! Luckily, I got a 3 day extension on my reimbursements, so I got to spend the weekend after school was out buying things for next year!


I'm linking up with Ladybug's Teacher Files Summer Shopping Linky Party to show you some of the things I bought. 

 Warning:  This is a long post.  Like I said, I had quite a bit of money to spend, so I got lots of goodies!


Much of it is at school, where I can't get to it until August 6th, and the rest is very carefully stacked, tetras-style, to fit in one of the few empty spots in my tiny apartment (we'll ignore that this stack means only three people can sit at the kitchen table).


Because I can't take pictures of the things at school and because undoing my stack to take pictures seems a daunting task, I've found the best pictures online that I could!  You'll see my actual ones as I work on personalizing them for my room.


First up....

I bought 40 of these tubs.  Most are going to be part of my classroom library.  My books started off this year not organized in any way (the teacher who had the room before me left me a ton of books, which was FANTASTIC, but I had no time to organize or look through them).  Over Holiday Break, I organized them by AR level.  This year, I want to focus more on genres than I did last year and I think organizing my books in tubs by genre will be a great way to extend studying genres beyond my mini-lessons.  Even though I won't use the lids for the classroom library, I'm glad to have found ones with lids so that I have more options if I choose to use some for something else!

More Storage ...

I bought 8 of these and would have bought more if they had more!  They are going to store as many of my math manipulatives as will fit in them.  I love that they are clear to see what is inside, but that they have a bit of purple on them. Last year, all four of us fourth grade teachers at my school color-coded all copies to help students stay organized.  Everything math was purple.  I'm hoping we keep this up next year (two new teachers on the team, so we'll see).  It really helps the kids that we all do it the same, since we rotate for math.  I'm trying to stick with purple for everything math-related in my room.

Organizing My Desk ...

I bought 6 of these, one for each day of the week (plus one since they came in packs of 3).  These will sit on my desk with files for each subject in each day's bin.  This is where I will keep copies for the week.  I'm not sure what the sixth one will be used for yet.  Maybe for if I'm super ahead and have copies for the following week made before the current week ends?  This year I used file folder racks.  I had one for each subject and each rack had a folder for each day of the week.  It worked well most of the time, but the files tipped over often and if I had a lot of copies for a particular day, they just didn't fit.

Organizing Student Work ...

I bought two of these.  Each drawer will be labeled and I will have students turn work in here.  That way things will be organized for me to grade.  I'm also planning on making matching magnets for each labeled drawer to put on the whiteboard so that students can reference what gets turned in where. 

Student Organization ...

32 half-inch binders.  I think I am going to have students use these for language arts.  I tried using notebooks last year, but too often I wanted them to put in graphic organizers or reference sheets.  They would glue them in and a few days later, our classroom floor would be littered with fallen out pages.

Reading Activity...

I'm super excited to try out these task cards from Lakeshore for reading time.  I love the idea of having so many activities/prompts that students can do with a variety of texts so that they can be used again and again.  It was so hard to decide between the fiction and non-fiction box, but since I feel more comfortable coming up with fiction reading tasks, I decided on these.  I also think some of them might work great during social studies or science by using the textbook as the nonfiction reading.

And of course, decorations ...

I bought lots of cute, colorful boarders and black fabric to cover my boards. I honestly can't remember what the boarders looked like right now and of course they're in my classroom, but I know I was excited for them when I bought them.  I can't wait to decorate my room!

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Wow that was a lot!  I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting things too.  Looking back over these has gotten me excited to get working on cute-i-fying them for my classroom and getting things ready for next year. Time to get to work ...

P.S. Does anyone know why my font changed after my first picture or how I can fix that?  I'm new to this!  Thanks!

Beginnings

Ahhh ... summer begins.  Yes, school ended almost two weeks ago, but I went straight into a weekend of classroom shopping (love reimbursements, don't love the strict timeline on when purchases must be made) and friends'  graduations and then a week and a half of professional development, complete with homework to do each night.  Now starts a month off of all have-to's.  Time to decorate my apartment (finally), take a road trip, and start really thinking about next year.


A pile of classroom purchases, ready to be cute-i-fied, sit next to me.  My social studies and science teacher editions wait in the book case behind me.  Two massive boxes of to-be-organized papers and file folders lurk near by.  A million ideas float in my head.  Where will I start?


Here is my ever-growing list of classroom-related things I want to do this summer, in no particular order:

• Organize my messy boxes of papers
• Create new behavior management plan (clip chart?)
• Plan my classroom layout (new room this year!  Way less storage, but way more wall space)
• Find and create classroom decorations
• Plan out quality social studies and science lessons that go beyond read these pages (as a class, independently, in partners ...) and do these worksheets/workbook pages.
• Read some of the books in my classroom library
• Re-vamp my daily schedule
• Read Daily 5 and Book Whisperer
• Decorate and label turn in boxes, copy-files, classroom library bins, math manipulative storage ...
• Re-vamp how I do classroom jobs
• Organize files on computer
• Set up classroom (in August, when I get my keys back)

We'll see what I get done this summer.  I'm excited for the chance to be so much more prepared for next year than I was for this past one!  I've been trying to force myself to do the less fun jobs (such as those boxes of papers) first, but so far that has resulted in nothing getting done.  Maybe some more crafty, fun work will get my motivation going ... hmmm ....


How do you prioritize your summer to-do list?