Friday Fun - Adventures in Decorating

So all you younger teachers out there are decorating mavens pinteresting (yes it is now a verb), laminating, cutting and hot gluing your way to virtual wonderlands of learning fun.  Now I pride myself on my creativity so I decided last year to do an actual theme in my classroom.  It is trickier with me as I have students in my room from age three to 12.  I decided to go with a Dr. Seuss theme because not only is the man a complete genius, everybody loves Dr. Seuss...right?

So I created cute bulletin boards, basket labels, center areas and labels all with a Dr. Seuss touch.  The first warning should have come when a third grade diva looked around one day and said. "What's with all the Dr. Seuss stuff."  They never told me in college that I would need to be prepared to defend my decorating choices to a bunch of third graders.

The next shot came from our quarterly student feedback.  Our district requires us to get student input quarterly as to how much they are learning and how fun it is.  As a part of my second quarter feedback, I used an Imagineering sheet for what would be the perfect speech program.  Their responses were put on post its and then I grouped them together.

And there it was.  Some of the kiddos wanted to help choose how the classroom looked.  With all the emphasis on student led, student engagement, student motivation that has been preached at every meeting and seminar I have attended in the last five years, no one ever suggested letting them help decorate your room.  Lady A and I said it would be like turning the decorating of your living room over to your husband!  However, one of the promises we made to our kids was that we would do our best to at least discuss each item on the Imagineering sheet.

So we decided to start small and let them decide how to decorate our hall bulletin board.  (I know what you are thinking...we cheated.  Every teacher would love to have someone decorate their bulletin board...but give us a break, giving up control is hard!) 

Check out some of their ideas.  Talk about a wide variety of ideas. I think my fifth graders tried to see how far I would go in letting them pick the theme.

I love how the claws and zombies were written right next to the puppies and Care Bears.  Obviously a Zombie Care Bear bulletin board was not going to reflect well on my teacher evaluation.  I tried to to group their ideas and let them vote.

We ended up doing an Angry Birds Cause and Effect board.  I created all different Angry bird body shapes, beaks, eyes etc and let them create their own Angry Bird.  They had to fill out a tag that gave the bird a name and say what made the bird angry.  Our favorite was "He is angry because he had to take ISTEP" (our statewide test.)  Sorry I forgot to take a picture of the board!

I am changing my room theme to Wild About Words next year.  We will probably do the bulletin board exercise again....and maybe, just maybe, they can weigh in on room decorations...in the future.

Friday Fun: Cat in the Hat Rhyming Hats

The one phonemic skill I hate teaching is rhyming.  It just seems the little ones either hear rhymes or they do not.  I feel like I am a talking idiot as I repeat the word pairs over and over trying so hard to emphasize the end of the words.  I get louder and louder.  Pretty soon my head starts bobbing up and down.  I am pretty sure the kids think I am a living breathing bobble head doll!

I decided to develop some rhyming centers that would remove me from the practice.  We did a week of Dr. Seuss so I created a rhyming center with Cat in the Hat.

You can get it to print here.  Just print on cardstock, laminate and cut out.  I used velcro for the stripes.

It is a simple center where the kiddos put the stripes on the correct hat.  I made sure to include words that were visually different.  Those little ones are smart.  They figure out patterns real quick.  I have to work hard to stay one step ahead of them! 

This was a great center.  However, I must warn you.  I got real excited when the second day they just flew through the center.  I was just sure they had mastered rhyming (and of course it was all due to my incredible hats!) Alas, a little probing revealed they memorized where they went.  Rule number one in teaching....vary your stimulus materials. So back to the drawing board for me!

Stay tuned for more rhyming centers.

Friday Fun

  Fridays are the best day of the week when you teach school.  Fridays are filled with a sense of anticipation of the weekend.  This year our speech schedule was super busy on Friday.  Lady A and I have vowed never to do that again.  Fridays are for fun.  On Fridays, you never know what may happen.
  Today I am going to share the Princess's latest thrift store find,  (Cue Macklemore singing "I'm gonna pop some tags.")  As I have said before we are big thrift store, dollar store, make it yourself people.  Whenever we are near a thrift store, we always stop in to check it out.  This past Tuesday we were in Goodwill when we found this gem.

You know this young lady, don't you?

   Olivia is the main character in a series of books written and drawn by Ian Falconer.  Princess loves Olivia because she is a pig after her own heart.  She loves to perform and her life is a vintage lover's dream.  Princess loves the vintagey colors and illustrations in Olivia books.

This is an Olivia theatre (Olivia would never spell it the American way too provincial.)  When you open it up it looks like this.

 

See this insert.

It had even more set backgrounds and characters.

     Indoor recess in third grade may never be the same.   Princess is in a quandary....should she laminate these pieces to keep them safe from grubby fingers?  Everything is a pretty hefty cardstock weight.  She is afraid laminating will take away from the muted tones. What do you think?

Oh and by the way, she paid a whopping $3 for this.  There is nothing like a thrift store find to make your heart soar.