Classroom Set-Up in Progress!

Whew, what a busy but productive day!

I just got home from my first day of classroom set-up for the year. Our first day of school is not until September 3rd.  I missed the Blog Hoppin' link-up for Teacher Week yesterday since I couldn't get into my classroom to take pics, but I figured I would sneak in some pics today along with an organizational tip!

When you are looking at these pictures, please keep in mind that I've only put in about 5-6 hours of work so far and ALL of my classroom furniture was in the hallway when I started this morning! A HUGE thank you goes to my mom who spent four fabulous hours keeping me on track and helping me haul furniture today! I would have nothing done without her help! It's is definitely a work in progress and will be all week long!  I will post pics of the finished product next week.

This is the entrance into my room. If you've read my blog for awhile, you know that I work in an open space.  There is no actual door to my room! You just walk down a hallway/ramp and here you are! Off to the left is an accoridian door that opens into the library.  You are looking at my mailboxes. Underneath in the blue cupboard is puzzle storage (obviously some puzzles have not made their way into the cupboard yet!).

This is standing at the mailboxes looking into my room.  You can see that there is NO wall on this side of the room-just portable cupboards as a room divider.  I will be putting bulletin boards up on all of these cupboards-only had time to do one today!  In front of the tall cupboards are my book bins, math manipulatives, and art and writing supplies.

This is just a zoomed out view of the picture above--lots of work to do yet!

This is the "front" of my room.  I used to have my rug, easel, and calendar up here.  The problem was that the wall is one of those foldable temp. walls and could not support my Promethean Board. So, this year I put the meeting area in the back of my room by the Promethean Board.  The "front" of the room is now where my teacher table is, as well as my classroom library-which is hard to see in this picture. The bookshelves are behind the stack of red chairs.  I'm going to spray paint the red bench green to go with my green and yellow theme.

Here's a close-up of my Daily 5 choice board.  You can get this for free by going to my post about it. I still need to put up the clothespins with the kid's names on it!

Here is a closeup of my reading strategies board. I am going to add all of our strategy friends (Chunky Monkey, Stretchy Snake, etc) as we learn about them!

Here is my poor leveled library shelf. Looks like it needs some straightening!

The beginnings of a meeting area! Love that easel!

The other end of my meeting area.

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me this week!  Considering my room was totally empty at 9:00 this morning, I think I got a good chunk of work done today though.

Also, here is one small organization tip: make a prioritized to-do list instead of one mega list.  It really helps me to stay on track with what is important to get done immediately.  Otherwise, I tend to do the "fun" projects first and forget about really important things until the last minute.  Below is an example that I made for the coming week: