Mindful Monday
This is where each Monday we are mindful of our pedagogy, slowly adjusting our lessons to match our theories.
First, let me apologize for not getting this posted yesterday. On top of being a new mommy (I can’t believe little bear is almost four months already!) we have bought a house! We actually closed today but we had so many things to do yesterday that I just didn’t get this up. I really should start scheduling my posts so you all don’t miss out!
I wanted to share with you all some of the things I did in my classroom last year. I am between schools right now so I haven’t set my room up this year, but it would be similar to last year’s.
I had a pretty symmetrical space to work with. The school I was in prior to the one I am sharing with you had a very different layout so at first I was feeling stuck. I wanted to give some definition to the various areas, but with the limited space it was hard to do that and keep good flow.
I am a big believer in keeping the overall space calm. I have read various articles about how the amount of stimuli in current early education classrooms can lead to attention problems and tantrums (maybe we can explore some of those in an upcoming Fill It Up Friday…). I like to leave blank areas at the beginning of the year so that as we incorporate the children’s work and anchor charts we have created the space still feels calm and soothing.
What do you think? In the last picture I am actually missing the tree (fake mind you, I can keep children alive and well, but classroom plants, forgeddaboudit!). The boxes you see in the last picture are what we used for books. All the bulletin boards are covered with a grey sheet I cut to fit. It was super cheap at Walmart and looked amazing through the whole year. After the children brought in their supplies I added neon green and blue baskets to the shelves under the bulletin boards to hold the extras.
I like to keep the theme consistent to I made chevron tags to use on my word wall. They were super easy!
I bought scrapbook paper on sale (and with a coupon, remember I’m one of those people). I also got black letters.
Then I simply used grey as the mounting and the striped paper as the border. Since each set of upper and lowers were a different size I tried to eyeball it to ensure they each had about the same amount of mounting and border.
I laminated it all and voila!
What is your favorite part of your classroom or your child’s room?