Classroom Tour Part 2

I can't believe it's already the fifth week of school. Well, actually I can. It has been non-stop in our little corner of Kindergarten and my students are accomplishing some amazing things. It's been several weeks since my last classroom post where I gave you sneak peak of how my room is looking this year. Well, welcome to part two of that tour....

 

I already shared our discovery station but I thought I would show you what it looks like now full of my students' special treasures. They love exploring and observing these nature items during station time.

The art station was a work in progress last time so I didn't share it. Here it is now with my student's artwork prominently displayed. We read the book Ish by Peter H. Reynolds and my students created their own "ish" paintings with watercolor. I have two easels hanging on the closet doors and plenty of art supplies (watercolors, markers, colored pencils crayons, glue sticks, scissors, etc.) that they can easily access.

 

Above our windows, is another art project that we did a couple of weeks ago. My students used paint chips to cut out shapes and they worked together to glue them down to create a mosaic. Sorry the picture is hard to make out. I stole this idea from my friend, Liz. You might want to stop by her blog, My Life in Projects. She has amazing ideas!

This is our word wall that our class is "building" together. We began our process the first couple weeks of school by writing each uppercase and lowercase letter. We then, matched those to the pre-made letters. Each week, we focus on a high frequency word and we add those as we go. 

A favorite part of our day has definitely been our writing workshop! In our writing workshop, my students are authors who make books. We made some charts to help remind us what authors do. The first one, Ways Authors Write, show my students that they can "write" or make books even if they don't know how to write words yet. I share my favorite wordless picture book with them called, Good Dog Carl by Alexandra Day to show them this. The next chart,  When I'm Done, simply offers my students ideas for what to do when they finish a book.

We have also begun our reading workshop and the students are doing independent reading several times a week. To help my students believe that they are readers I teach them these three ways to read a book. I like to use photographs as visuals for my charts to help my students remember what they are about. When I taught this lesson, for example, I took pictures of the books I used to model each thing and added them to the chart.

Here is our meeting area. I do a great deal of my teaching from my easel. Next door to the easel, I have a little end table that I "rescued" from a thrift store. I gave her a nice coat of paint and now she holds a basket for our favorite read alouds.

Here is the meeting area from the other direction. My students love to sit on these Ikea benches and I love having them for storage. They house baskets of books and literacy work stations. They also serve as seating for two of our tables, which is a great space saver.

 

Last but not least, here is an overall snapshot of the room. Dangling over the meeting area, I have a branch with the students self-portraits. On the back of their self-portraits I glued a black and white photograph of each child. They love staring at it and finding the pictures of themselves and their friends.
 

Well, there you have it! I hope you enjoyed my classroom posts. I will be back soon to share some of the exciting things we are doing in Kindergarten.