My Classroom
I went a little crazy with my camera on Friday. For everyone who wants to see one of my classrooms- or if you're looking for decorative ideas for a bus-stop entry room:)- here are some pics of my 3rd grade room at school:










We have a word wall with every new word we've discussed from the weekly stories, separated by parts of speech. My Chinese dragon is above our "new word" reading strategies (so the students learn how to figure out a word when they're reading alone). Above the white board are our four Reciprocal Teaching reading strategies, which we just starting practicing last week...the students came up with the replies to each statement or question, for example:
"Will you help me figure this out?"
"Sure. Why not? Let's figure it out together: teamwork!"
On the right side of the board is our theme of the week and new vocabulary that the students requested help understanding.










Our Teamwork mural, inspired by "Detroit Industry" by Diego Rivera. We had to spend a lot of time brainstorming words to use when talking about teamwork, but now they bring it up all the time. We worked on prefixes and suffixes at the beginning of the year, and we brainstormed a list of plural and singular adjectives. Finally, on the bottom is our influential immigrants wall. My students saw an article on the table one day about Elaine Chao (the US Secretary of Labor) that I had ripped out of a magazine. I explained that she moved to the United States from Vietnam and had to learn English, too, and now she has a very important job that helps many people. They got so excited to learn more about other former ESL students. It was so hard to find biographies of successful Guyanan-Americans!

The heat is my room is so mixed up. It's below zero until 8:30, when the doors are finally closed. Then the heat turns on and it goes up to 80 degrees. Layering is a must:)