First Full Week of School and an EXPLOSIVE start.

Hi. So that's Jitter Juice on the floor. Not on purpose.

Here is the scenario. First day of school. 7:40. Students come in at 7:45. I attempt to do an easy version of Jitter Juice..i.e. Sprite and red food coloring. Insert food coloring, shake, slowly open, all good. Then I saw on Instagram someone added sprinkles to her concoction. I thought, hey, I have a year old bottle of sprinkles in my closet. Sprinkles don't go bad, do they? Let's pour some sprinkles into the soda bottle.  Did anyone know that sprinkles are basically LIKE MENTOS in soda???? Yea, neither did I. But my floor, desk, walls, kids' desks and chairs, books, fresh copies for the first day - me, yup, we all succumbed to the 3 foot high volcano that erupted out of the bottle.

Is there anyone science-y reading this that can tell me why that happened????

Here are a few pictures of my favorite parts of my classroom. 

His shirt says, "Our Class is One in a Minion."

Two ways that I'm utilizing low wall space:

Interactive Word Wall. I printed out most of the Dolch sight words and any other second graderish words I knew kids would want to know how to spell, and hung them from command hooks onto metal rings. Whenever students want to find a word, they can take the ring back to their desks and flip through it. 

This is the other side of my room. I hung book bags from the wall. In the bags, students can put one or two books and a notebook for centers/rotations. I number my students, so they know which bag is theirs. 

I have a lot of other teachers that come into the classroom to teach specials. And we all know that kids aren't always on their best behavior with other teachers. So I started this Compliment Cookie Jar. If another teacher gives the class a compliment and they behaved during that period, they earn a cookie. They can lose a cookie as well. When they fill up all the cookies, they will earn an incentive. I haven't thought about an incentive yet. Cookies maybe? P.S. I haven't uploaded this cookie jar and cookies thing anywhere...but if anyone wants it, lemme know! *Edited - I had some requests for this, so now you can find it HERE. 

That's the front of my desk. Last year, I went deskless. This year my desk is full of junk. I don't know how I stored all that junk last year?? It was still in my room. 

That's my mini me from Tongass Teacher printed to poster size. Cutting out the word, "Rocks," was no easy task friends. 

Who sees the red Sprite residue coming down the front of the desk!!???? I do!! 

The night before school started, I made homemade playdoh for the kiddos. 

Then I rolled out dough balls, put a hole in them, added around 4-5 drops of food coloring, and closed up the hole. The first day of school, students kept the playdoh in the bag and started smushing it in there, (otherwise the color would run on their hands). Of course I told them it was magic play doh and that something would start happening to it when they did this. I seriously think some of them actually thought it was magic. 

Then, I had them create something with their playdoh and write about what they made. 

You can get this one page template for the writing HERE. (Frame from Creative Clips and Fonts from KG Fonts and Leeby's Fonts). 

Open House was the third day of school. Ok, you have to read this article about how teachers feel during Open House. Laugh out loud funny!! So much is true for me.

Anyway, I used my Open House Forms Freebie Pack to put out a bunch of things for parents to keep themselves busy while other parents talked to me. The website permission form is from The Tutu Teacher. I love when other teachers create what I planned on doing anyway!!

I bought little frames from Michaels and made some signs (also in my Open House Packet). These two signs were for my wish list items and you can't see it but the pink sign was in front of a bowl of mints. No one ate the mints. I am currently eating about 5 a day now. 

I love teaching odd and even numbers!! I made Odd Todd and Even Steven. After working through and practicing with the odd and even numbers, I put students into partners and gave them a paper plate each. I dumped a bunch of goldfish onto the plate. They had to count them up together and after figuring out how many fish, they had to write it down on the paper plate. After they did that, they could eat the fish. When we got together as a group, they had to go stick the paper plates with their number correctly next to Odd Todd or Even Steven. Coincidentally, it turned out that Even Steven had an even number of plates (4), and Odd Todd had an odd number of plates (5), and when I pointed this out, the kids thought it was the most amazing thing ever. Magic. 

See you soon!