Summer Lovin'

Hold the presses!  It has been awhile!  As much as my body (and personality) enjoy a schedule, one of my favorite parts of summer is not having one at least in the form of a beyond early wake up call.  I like being able to work on things when it is convenient and not always having to finish.  I also love being able to get things done in terms of bigger projects that get sidelined during the day to day operations of the school year.

I was given a stamp as a spring gift from one of my families.  I have a ton of children's literature.  It is beyond ridiculous.  I loved the stamp and quickly decided it would be a summer project to stamp my books as well as go through them.  I do not have as much storage in this classroom as my previous one and after 9 years, it is time to sort through books and get rid of well loved, rarely used, etc.  This is an ongoing project.  I still have 2 shelves left to stamp and go through in terms of discards. 

I also had my listening center books in random places.  Some of them were with my children's books because they were by a familiar author while others were just stashed away in a crate taking up shelf space in a random cabinet.  As I went through my books, I tried to put them all either with their author or where I would use them in terms of units.  It was nice to get rid of the crate and open up storage space.  It is also helpful to see which areas I have books on tape or cd and other units which I do not have something that relates to what we are studying.

I had a book shelf by my bathroom.  It was put there from a different spot last summer.  I did not hate the placement of it but I hated the traffic pattern it created through the year.  I do not like traffic buzzing by my small groups when I am working with children.  I saw this idea on Pinterest.  I moved the shelf onto of another shelf in my classroom library area.  This solves two problems hopefully (space and traffic).  I realize the children cannot reach the top shelves.  I can use those shelves to keep the books I need handy for lessons so they do not get misplaced then after the lesson they can be put where they are more accessible to children.

When I was moving around my books and discarding, I opened up a lot of shelf space.  I took a collection of children's literature books related to math and moved them to an open shelf.  In doing this, I opened up shelf space in my classroom library.  One of my other summer projects has been to create a "fluency notebook" or station.  Fluency is one of my main goals when my children practice read to someone.  Fluency in kindergarten looks different than it might in an older grade where children are reading longer text.  I set aside three baskets and have fluency resources in these baskets including: fluency phones, sight word rings, and in the middle I am going to put a fluency notebook that has our weekly poems for children to practice reading.  I am also going to include some highlighter tape so that they can identify sight words or rhymes in our weekly poems.  I want these to be options when early finishers complete their work during our daily 5.  I am hoping some other ideas will evolve when I meet this upcoming group of children (based on their needs) as well as implementing these ideas and seeing how they need to change to benefit the group.

In thinking about traffic patterns and daily 5, I moved my writing materials to my writing center.  A novel idea, I know!  I always clean out the writing center at the end of the year because many of the things we use involve children and their names.  Some other things that children have access to are word banks (Pinterest), alphabet linking charts (Fountas and Pinnell), and other resources like pattern block templates, old birthday bulletin board materials (months of the year) that provide them with ways to spell without interrupting me!  The Fountas and Pinnell linking chart is a huge resource for reading and writing.  I use it at the beginning of the year when we are working on letter identification and sounds and I also have one that I use later in the year for diagraphs and blends.  Each child has a copy of it that goes in their book box as well as one that I send home for them to hang on their fridge to use as a resource when they read or write there.

I have three shelves behind my teacher table.  I do not always pull my groups from the teacher table.  However, I do like the area organized for small group instruction whether it be the materials I use or materials that children will use while I am with small groups.  This was not that big of a task and I organized it to meet my needs.

Shelf one has teaching and assessment materials: my assessment notebook, assessment tub (materials that I use to assess including coins, number cards, etc).  

Shelf two was organized for small group materials that I primarily use during individual instruction or smaller groups of students including guided reading or interventions.  

Shelf three has materials that are used by students during daily 5 (mostly word work) including sight words, sorts, and vowels.

One of my goals is to organize my "teacher" closet.  It has not happened yet.  I did clean it out some and have been discarding items this summer.  I am sure there are people that have more stuff than me but after nine years, I might have hoarded some things along the way.  I also shoved everything in the closet on the last day of school so it looks worse than it ever was.  The biggest problem I have with this closet is the amount of limited space.  The metal shelf is one that I put in there but I have a ton of wasted space at the top of the closet.  I am trying to add shelves to the shelf that is already in there to open up space at the bottom and utilize the space to its maximum.