For the Love of Books

For the Love of Books

For the past few years, Princess Kay has been amassing books.  Lots and lots of books.  She says it was all for her classroom, but I think it really is to feed her habit.  Since she was little, she has loved to read.  Now she has an excuse to buy books.  She first tried buying lots on Ebay.  Pirces were reasonable, but shipping tended to add up.  She initially began her collection by doing what all teachers do...buying from Scholastic Books Clubs.  Then she discovered Goodwill book bins on half off day.  Books galore for a quarter apiece (or 50 cents if they are hardback.) Oh my...she thought she had died and gone to heaven. 

Over the past two years, she has collected close to 350 books.  She said she was organizing them, but I think she spread them out so she could gaze upon all their loveliness.  She has promised to stop for awhile.  However during our thrifting day last week I found her head deep in a bin shrieking "Junie B. Jones, Horrible Harry and Flat Stanley!!"

If you have young readers, you might want to check out Goodwill.  Just watch out for a redhead with a crazy gleam in her eye.  She just might pepper spray you to get that Fancy Nancy book you are holding.

Room Reveal-Traveling through Third Grade

Sorry for being absent the last two weeks.  School has started and between meetings and trying to get our rooms ready, we have come home exhausted every night.  Princess Kay has finished her first ever classroom and it deserves its very own Pinterest board.  It is stinkin' cute.  So bear with this post it is going to be veritable visual feast for the eyes.

Princess Kay spent a summer in Ireland and fell in love with traveling so naturally her theme is Traveling through Third Grade.

 The Library:  Because of room and the age of the students, she opted to not have a reading corner.  Instead she will let them create their reading spaces throughout the room.

 Isn't that an awesome reading bulletin board.  She plans to challenge her students to find other books to use to change out the board throughout the year.

 She was left with cracking and broken book baskets by the teacher who retired.  So it was off to the dollar store for the cheapest bins a new teacher could afford.  Some day she will get the ones she wants.  Alas, the books left by the retiring teacher were not only very very old, but the were in sad shape.  Most of these books are hers and come from digging and searching thrift stores.  Stay tuned for a post telling how to fill out your class library for pennies on the dollar.

 The book shelves and desk clumps came from the wonderful blog Dandelions and Dragonflies.  They cut down on movement and really promote the community our district stresses (they frown on desks in rows)

 The book shelves were $15 a piece at Walmart.  She just added maps before she put the back on.  They are perfect for their data notebooks, book boxes and math manipulatives.  With a little wastebasket, the groups are set.

 As we were moving out tons and tons of furniture, to make the room more spacious, I kept trying to convince her not to get rid of bookcases (you know there are some pieces of furniture you never get rid of because you will never find them when you need them!)  She agreed to keep it, but opted to turn it on its side and make a writing counter.  Genius!  In case, you can't read it, each section has a trait (and Ideas is on top).  The baskets hold mentor texts for each trait.

 Again, the bulletin board will evolve over the years as they learn about each trait.  She will add anchor charts and other visual displays of what they discover.

 As we were cleaning out cupboards, we came across these flat flimsy boards.  We had no idea what they were.  I thought they looked the perfect size for mileage signs.  I sprayed them green and used my Silhouette to cut out letters and numbers.  That is the correct mileage from our school.  She outlined the computers with electrical tape so she can designate their use for centers and other projects.

 When she got in the room, she only had a Smart Board.  There was no other place to write.  She was going to put in a ticket to get a white board.  However, she was in so much over the summer working on her room that she made great friends with the custodians (the first lesson every new teacher should learn.)  She saw them taking down a white board and mentioned that she would love one in her room.  They took the board straight to her room and installed it right then and there! 

 Check back later for posts about her classroom procedures.  They are really fun and her kiddos love them.  She said the whole class came walking in the room from their very first recess with four fingers up! (in order to get a drink)

Common Core has arrived so here is her nonfiction cart and the table will eventually be a nonfiction center.  One of her desires was to have books all over the room to help her kids see how reading takes place everywhere.  So she has a book library, a writing center with books, a non fiction center and even a picture book spot

This spot is just inside her door.  The tent flip book tells the kids what specials day it is. (and she stuck in another book!)

She found the bingo game at an antique store and loved its vintage feel.  She also read a study that said if students knew prefixes, suffixes and root words, they magnify their vocabulary tremendously.  As they line up and have a few minutes, they will take a ball and use a dauber to mark the Bingo cards.  They will discuss the prefix, suffix or root.  The class will celebrate when they get a bingo.

 Here is her in and out board for when her students leave the room.  She painted those clothespins and then we saw on pinterest how to dye them.  She could have saved herself about two hours!

 She found this magazine rack at a garage sale for $3.  We just gave it a coat of black spray paint.

 Check more on the map chair here.

 New teachers don't need desks or file cabinets.  They are products of the technological age!

 We had seven teachers retire this year.  There were lots of things to snatch up in their give away piles.  However, there were very few cute things.  She jazzed this up with maps, contact paper and Mod Podge.

 No matter what theme she had, she knew Fancy Nancy would put in an appearance.  I found clipart and added a suitcase.  We printed it using the tiled poster option on the printer.  We just had to piece it together and laminate.  She is gorgeous, don't you think?

 Binder clips....what a great idea!

Name Plates

Pretty awesome, don't you think?  Makes you want to be in third grade again!

Silly Sally Fun Pack

Another week of summer preschool has come and gone.  This week our theme was Silly Sally.  Silly Sally is a wonderful picture book that has a definite sequence and lends itself to teaching rhyming.

 

 I must admit I hate to teach rhyming.  Kids seem to get it right away or they don't.  I THOUGHT my students on the autism spectrum were going to town on the whole rhyming thing when I realized the had just memorized the word pairs we practiced!  I had to create several more tasks for them to practice.  I will post those soon.  In the meantime here are some of the pages in the Silly Sally Fun pack.

 

We practiced writing color words. (I have some five and six year old students who have mastered most if not all pre-K skills,  We just kept building!)

 I cut these apart and use clothes pins to select the correct answer.  You could laminate and use dry erase markers as well.  I laminate everything and use them over and over with dry erase markers.

You can get the whole pack here.   I hope you enjoy it.  You will have to let me know if our students are as puzzled as mine were by the character Neddy Buttercup....they just couldn't figure him out.

Queen Pea

Froggy Gets Dressed

Whew!  The week flew by...preschool has been keeping me busy.  Our summer preschool is for our students with more intense needs....for whom 12 weeks of down time would have us starting back at square one.  My preschool routine is based on ABA and TEACCH philosophies.  Each week I choose a book and we read it each day.  I do that because these students need repetition before they can participate.  By Thursday and Friday, they actively interact with the book and all our activities.  Following our circle time (which includes the usual calendar stuff as well as a language activity) the students do individual work basket task.  I try to create activities that follow the book as well as work on skills.

 

This week we read Froggy Gets Dressed.  I love the story for the wonderful sequencing skills.  I also thought a little snow in our drought-filled scorching summer might be cool! (pun intended)   I created some work tasks, a card game and a craft to go with the story.  The clipart came from kidzclub.com.  This wonderful site has tons and tons of story props for trade books.  It is one of the first sites I hit when I am lesson planning.  Here is a glimpse of some of the things I created.

Get the whole pack here.  This my first posting to Google docs so let me know if you have an problems.

Queen Kay

For the Love of Reading: E. L. Konigsburg

When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite books was From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.  I so wanted to hide out in a museum and have the same adventure.  I reread it over and over again.  The book won the Newbury Award in 1967.   Princess Pea read the book in fourth grade (and I confess I re-read it  for like the hundredth time.)  It is a part of both of our classroom libraries.  Princess Pea is always shocked when she brings up the book and her fellow education majors have never heard of it.

 

 With six teachers retiring this year, Princess Pea did a fair amount of snatching up books for her classroom library.  From one teacher, she found two other books by E.L. Konigsburg.  Who knew she was still writing after all these years.  We looked her up and she is quite the prolific writer.  We thoroughly enjoyed these two books.

 

 

This summer we encourage you to throw a few E.L. Konigsburg titles along with your usual beach reads.  You won't be sorry!

Queen Pea

Heard at Preschool

Every summer I teach our special ed cooperative's summer preschool.  Each our four preschools across two counties recommend their little lovelies who they think need a little extra boost over the summer.  I have been teaching it for eight years.  For eight years I have laughed and laughed at the things they say or the predicaments we get in.  Today  was an affirmation that the younger generation are the techie kings.

Overheard on the playground from a delightful young man on the truck play equipment:

:"Does this firetruck have a Garman?"

Overheard at playtime, from a little sweetheart playing with the cash register:

"What should I tweet?"

Queen Pea

Book Pals Part 3 -The Saga of a Turtle

Those little touches to a classroom often don't come cheap.  We have found  if you dig through those bins of stuffed toys in your local thrift store, you can find Book Pals for very very cheap.   After pricing Book Pals online, (anywhere from $15- $50) we decided to try and recreate them.  See our Fancy Nancy here and our Pete the Cat here.  While out recently, we were looking for stuffed characters we could adapt and re-purpose for pals when we came across these friends.

That's the dinosaur from How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? (among other sequels.)  Next is Thing 1 from Cat in the Hat.  He is sitting next to Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham.  On his left is Franklin the Turtle.  Finally there is a dinosaur that we do not know the name.  He looked familiar and he is a Kohl's for Kids creature which is usually a book pal. Any ideas of the book?  We didn't pay over $1.50 for any of them.  WooHoo!

   So we first found this guy at a Goodwill.  We thought he looked just like Franklin without a hat.  We thought we could create a hat for him.  We were sure we had found our Franklin.

  Then we stopped at another Goodwill and found this guy.

   What were we thinking???  We hang our heads in shame.  How can we call ourselves book lovers when we make this kind of mistake???  They look NOTHING alike.  

   So now we have this unnamed turtle.  Maybe we can find a rabbit and then we will have the characters from The Tortoise and the Hare.  Despite our confusion, we still think we scored big in our search for book characters.  What do you think?

Queen Pea and Princess Kay

Pinterest Inspiration - The Teacher Chair

Princess Kay is working on her classroom.  We will be posting before and after pictures in a few weeks (it is going to take that long.  Cleaning out a retired teachers 40 years of stuff takes a while!)  She is doing a travel theme and has been looking for a classroom chair.  We pinned this one a while ago.

Amber's Teacher's Chair

We found this white chair and considered just duplicating this Amber's chair since Princess could make a zebra fit a travel theme (and she has always had a love of zebra....it was her freshman dorm room theme.)   However, she dug out an old atlas from our closet and asked if we could use it somehow.

So with a little Mod Podge,  a little paint and a coat of polyurethane and Princess Kay's first ever teacher was created.

One room project done and  a few  several  a million more to go....good thing my own classroom just needs a few touches to get it ready.

Queen Pea

I am linking to the Pnterest Challenge at
 Young House Love
Bower Power
Censational Girl