How we use our word wall

Doesn't it make you feel so good to see your kids looking around the room and using the boards that you worked so hard on?? I've been seeing my kids use our word wall more and more each day and it makes my heart happy! Here's our word wall as of two weeks ago:

I color coordinate our words. The dark pink are words that we covered during the first week of ABC review. The lighter pink ones were covered during the second week. The orange words are Unit One words. I typed them this year and found that this worked much better than writing them on sentence stripes like last year for some reason. I have since moved that small blue easel because it was blocking the U box and the V box. I used a large font size because I wanted to make sure the kids to could see it from multiple angles and I love the way it turned out, but I'm going to have to downsize on some boxes like 'Tt" because hardly any more words will fit. :) 

We're starting initial blends next week, which is one of my most favorite phonics skill to teach! That opens up so many more words that my kids can sound out and spell. If anyone has any ideas, center activities,  strategies or charts, please comment below or email me! :)

One last thing...if you've emailed me, I promise I will eventually get back with ya! I've been super busy with a RTI workshop, a mini field trip and technology meetings this week. I would love to say that next week will be a calm week, but it's homecoming, which means crazy fun dress up days!! Maybe we'll get back to normal one of these days!

Classroom Decorating: Day Seven

Here's a tip for everyone working in your classrooms, getting ready for Back to School: Eat before you leave the house, or bring a snack! I woke up this morning not hungry at all so silly me didn't even think about preparing for later on. A couple of hours later, I am beyond hungry. Sooo day seven was a short working day. Here's what was accomplished before I called it a day (morning?) and headed to the nearest fast food restaurant :) 

Accomplished: My sounds board

I like having a place in the room to add sounds as we learn them each week. For example, our first sound is short /a/, so when we cover that sound, we'll add it to the board and add some words that have that same sound. 

Accomplished: Names attached to Mailboxes...how cute are they??

Accomplished: One corner of the classroom *entirely* finished! 

I can't wait to show y'all how I'm displaying my anchor charts. It's really cute in my mind so hopefully it will turn out that way... fingers crossed! I also have a really cute idea for behind my cubbies, but it's still a work in progress. 

***Reading Street Teachers! Join the linky party and share your favorite SFRS ideas!! :)

New Bulletin Boards

3 weeks 'til school's out for summer...perfect time to change boards one more time, right? Our classroom was due for a change! :) 


This is our fiction/non-fiction board. We graphed which classmates liked fiction the best and which preferred non-fiction. Then the kids picked their favorite fiction or non-fiction book and drew the cover. We also created a Venn diagram.

At the beginning of the year, I created 'Roll, Read, and Write' for our Word Work center. Each student rolls the dice and matches up the number they rolled to the word on the form. Then they write about that word. Each week the words change depending on the sound skill. I hope to upload these onto Teachers Pay Teachers soon! It is a center favorite in my room! The kids started out just writing one sentence with their word, but now most are creating stories about their word. I made this board to showcase some of their best Roll, Read, and Writes 

We've been working on writing our own number story problems in math, so that's where this board is for.

Our reading story this week was all about Alexander Graham Bell, so we created our door with phones! Under each phone, the kids wrote one fact they learned about Bell from the story.

Next week, we are using the book  Junie B. Jones Aloha Ha Ha as our reading story. If anyone has ever done activities with this book, or have any ideas, please share! You wouldn't believe the lack of material on this cute book!