Classroom Reveal....Part 1

Hi guys!  I've been sort of MIA in blogland this week because I've been in my classroom setting up.  You know how all-consuming that is!

 

Last year, I changed my classroom theme from Busy Bees to Wise Owls, and I did a lot of redecorating.  This year, I'm continuing the change and adding some new owly touches.  Today's post is not exactly a classroom reveal (I still have next week and I need it!  Lol) but here are some sneak peeks of my work-in-progress!  This pic is from last year:

I wasn't teacher blogging last year, so I don't have a ton of purposeful "before" pictures, but here is a little peek at my old desk area and the black bulletin board beside it (if you can see it, all covered in papers). I had a black and red apple theme going on there to kind of separate it from the bright colors in the rest of the room.  Why?  I don't know.  Grown up space?  Lol... anyway... I redid the bulletin board, here it is now:

So much brighter!  I love it.  Someone showed me the amazing trick a few years ago of buying fabric to cover my bulletin boards instead of awful butcher paper which gets all wrinkled and never comes out the right size even though you thought you cut it perfectly.  So now I have my blue cloth background, which I will just take home and wash at the end of the year and re-use next year! (I have been doing this for a while, it doesn't even fade!  It's a bulletin board miracle!)  The border is from the TREND Owl-Stars Collection (I got it at a Lakeshore teacher store):


Click here for more TREND Owl-Star products on their website

So cute! I am in love with their products; their owls are cute, colorful, and quirky.  I also have their job chart:

Click here for ordering info

.. along with their notepads, charts, stickers, weather chart, calendar... tons of their cutie patootie owls.  No, I don't work for them or get kickbacks (lol), I just really like their stuff!

I also added these to my new teacher board:

 
Can you see them?  They are little owl clothespins!  I got them on a trip to Michaels, where they had a whole owl display:


Seriously.  I wanted it ALL.

But I only bought these.

I used my trusty hot glue gun to glue thumbtacks to some of the clothespins:


 

 

And then I added some of Lakeshore's magnet dots to the back of a few and stuck them right next to my teacher board on my whiteboard.  I will stick one of those to our metal doorframe when we go outside with a little note to let people know where we are. I'm using the owl craft in that picture for one of the first days (depending how hard it turns out to be) and the sleep mask will be for pin-the-tail-on-whatever at class parties.  Yay!

 

Here are a few more great finds... from Michaels' 70% OFF BIN!!!! WHAT!?!

 

I almost died when I saw them.  The kiddie chair is really small, so not sure how I will use that yet, but the stepstool will replace the plain white one my kiddies use to reach the higher parts of our SMARTboard.  The stuffed owls are actually supposed to be bookends, they are surprisingly heavy.  So they will be decorations.  But 70% off, people!!!

 

And then there are my new teacher drawers, which I am LOVING, thanks to Learning in Wonderland's Owl Be Organized Teacher Toolbox, one of my favorite TpT purchases from the BTS sale!

 

I can hardly contain the cuteness where there used to be plain drawers with white labels that I wrote on.  LOVE!!!

 

Next, I updated my book boxes, which used to look like this:

... but now look like this, thanks to Carson Dellosa's owl name tags.  (I have a TON of their owl products, too.  Again, I have never been sent samples or asked to endorse a product.  I just buy stuff.  And love it.  Hehe).

I have also been updating my letter/number/sign language posters, since they put up my SMARTboard a while back and suddenly blocked the view of my old set:



This is a summer pic, not a finished classroom pic.  See how my letters are blocked?



So I made a new owly ABC poster set, mounted it on construction paper (consonants in brown, vowels in pink):

On my carpet, waiting to be cut

I also made new number posters and sign language fingerspelling ABC posters, and then my lovely older daughter helped me cut it all!

 

 Here's what the alphabet looks like now:



Happiness!  Now my kids can actually see it!  Lol.  I know the letters are hard to see in the picture but they aren't in real life (hopefully the close up above shows them better).

 

So that is what I have been up to so far!  Lots more to do, but it's getting there.  My class just got their teacher assignments this past week and I got an email from one of my cutie patooties just saying hello and introducing herself.  Soooo cute!  I am definitely excited about the new year!