Teaching Little Smarties: organizing

I have been working on and off trying to get my classroom ready for my sixth graders. Now I want to share my classroom with you!

All my desks are ready with my student's name tag. I want to thank my friend and coworker for writing the names in cursive, it looks so much better than my handwriting :).

I am loving my "what stuck with you today" board. We have to use exit slips this year, this is a quick way for me to see what my students learned each day. My board also says August 18 and today is the 19 and no we have not started school yet. I live in St. Louis where Micheal Brown was killed, so our first day of school has been pushed back to the 25th, in hopes that the violence has died down so it is safe for our student to walk to school.

This is the back corner of my room. I have been following The Brown Bag Teacher's blog and I will being doing th 40 book challenge. I want my students shoot for that goal, but also be proud of any number of books they read this school year!

My library turned out great!! The label are from my TpT store and the baskets I got from Dollar Tree. Quick note all my baskets in my room including the caddies on the desk all came from Dollar Tree.

Small group table is ready for students too!

This is my desk area. I probably will not be spending a lot of time here. I like to sit at my table most of the time.

This year I have a smart board in my room. Last year I had a promethean board. I really like both equally. They both have their good and bad points. In the front drawers, I keep extra supplies students will need. If they run out of something they can go to one spot to find everything they will need.

I am thinking of changing my star work board, but this will do for now.

Last thing I want to show is my word wall. We will be keeping track of all our vocabulary word in all subjects.

Well that is it for now. I hope you like my room and saw something you could use in your classroom. I also want to dedicate this post to Michael Brown and his family, hope the protesting stays peaceful so students can walk safely to school!

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First I want to say I am so excited because I got a new job in a new district. I will be teaching sixth grade next year. I am really going to miss my first graders, but I hope to one day go back to primary.

Now that I am going to a new grade I had to switch out my classroom library. I packed up all my primary book; except for some I will use for teaching like my non-fiction books mostly ( biographies, animals books, science books, etc.). For the past few days, I have been going through my chapter books to get them level and labeled.

Books have literately taken over my living room. My goal for this month is to have all my books leveled and labeled for the school year. I am leveling my book by using scholastic book wizard and book source classroom organizer, which is where I log all my books.

I really like using book source classroom organizer because it organizes your library and the teacher can keep track of all the books students check out of their library. With book source you can also quickly scan books into your library using your cell phone or iPad. It makes the process go so much faster, then typing each ISBN #. When students go to check out books (since I will be teaching sixth they will check out their books) they can use an iPad to check out. When you add book to your library you can type or scan the ISBN #.

Since I am moving, my new school will be using accerlated reader and they are starting to implement guided reading, so when I level my books, I put the guided reading reading level, the lexile level, and how many accerlated reader points the book is worth. I also label my books with a please return sticker just in case it grows legs and ends up somewhere else lol! The last thing I do is put a location label on the book. This sticker tells my librarian what basket the book belongs in.

The last thing I want to show you is how my books are sorted. Because I am teaching sixth grade next year I am not going to sort my books by reading level, like I did with my first graders. I redid my book bin labels and they are avabile in my TpT store for purchase. I have sorted my books by series ( captain underpants, bad kitty, Harry potter, 39 clues, etc), historical fiction, humor, horror, fantasy, non-fiction, etc...

With my book bin labels there are blank labels for you to choose what you want and all the labels that are numbered are also editable.

Thank you reading my post. Let me know if you have any advice for me in sixth grade or any suggestion about organizing my library!