The students and I are on a very important mission. The students are setting out on a journey to learn the fundamentals of reading and math, discovering science and exploring the world around them. We have a space and astronaut theme in our classroom. Each student is part of our astronaut team. All team members have to work together to complete a safe and fun mission.
Take a peek inside our classroom:
Here I am sitting at our small group teaching table. I meet with small groups of students to teach reading and math skills. During station time you will see me wearing a special visor. The visor is a reminder to the students at stations that I am busy teaching and they must wait to ask me for assistance.
This is our group meeting area. We spend a lot of our time here. Our days start as we complete a morning message, read a story and make connections with our reading and the world around us. Later in the morning we have calendar and math time. There are a variety of songs we sing and dance to, so that is why we need so much room. In the afternoon we hold writing minilessons here. I like to share the pen with students as we create collaborative lists, letters, stories and articles on many science and social studies concepts.
Our library is another favorite spot in our classroom. We have over 800 books. Yes, even in kindergarten! I think it is extremely important to get books in children's hands as early as possible. Our books are organized by theme and author. Throughout the year the students will do an author study on some of our favorite authors. The children will enjoy reading books by Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, Leo Lonni, Bill Martin, Marc Brown, Rosemary Wells, Karma Wilson, Ezra Jack Keats, and many more.
In our classroom we have student desks. Each student will be repsonsible for their own materials and supplies. Inside each desk students will have their supplies as well as a writing journal and a math journal. Each group of desks is named after a planet. This is our Earth Group. Students will complete indpendent and group work at the desks. In the afternoons the students will also use this space during our Writer's Workshop (my favorite time of the day).
At the front of the classroom you can see our word wall. It is empty now, but in just a few days we will begin adding names and words to the wall. I decided to put the word wall on our magnetic whiteboard, which creates an interactive way for students to use words. During station time students will use the words for sorting activities. A favorite activity is to sort the words by the number of letters in the word. To the left is our writing center. At the writing center the children can find several resources such as word books and picture dictionaries.
In this bin you can find the students' STAR folders. The folders will go home every day. Inside the folder are several learning tools to use for practice at home. There is also a school year calendar, class newsletter and money/notes pouch. Students who take extra care of the folders will receive a special prize at the end of the year.
Here are some other views of the classroom:
This is the Mars group. To the left is our computer station and to the right is our small group teaching area.
This is a picture of the Neptune group and the back of the room. On the cabinets doors are astronaut cutouts. Each child will earn several mission patches after successfully mastering different skills. Some of the skills include letter identification, counting to 100, number identification to 30, tying shoes, reading our lightning words (high frequency words) and several others.
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