It’s time for a new school year (and hopefully a more normal year!)! I’m excited about the adventure that awaits and I’m excited to show you our classroom. We are following all of our district guidelines as they are now. Of course, everything is subject to change so we’re going to be flexible and adapt as necessary. We are allowed to use shared supplies, our carpets, and centers. We are encouraging social distancing as much as possible and I will continue to use our enhanced cleaning procedures from last year. There is a video tour at the end of the post and I highly encourage to watch and listen as I explain things in depth in the video!
The Classroom
The biggest change in our classroom this year is the return of the rugs and flexible seating. We have created plenty of space so we can spread out when we work. When we gather for the whole group, we will utilize the oval carpet and round carpet so we are not sitting as close together. This year we kept our blue/green/orange color scheme but we added new borders from The Superhero Teacher! The room is once again designed so the students own as much of the space as possible!
Whole Group Area
This is where we have our morning meetings, do our mini-lessons, end the day with dance parties and learn and play! The alphabet and number line are available in our store and are linked at the end of this post. The easel is moved to the carpet when we are doing whole group lessons. When it’s not in use, the easel is moved out of the way to open up more space for us to work! The furniture in our room is on wheels so it can be easily moved to allow for much more open space for any activity or game we might want to play! I love the flexibility of our classroom!
Small Group Area
The big change to our small group area is that we removed our beloved mustache rug. We have also kept this area as small as possible so the kids have as much of the room as possible. We have a detailed post about this small group area linked at the end of this post. The stools are from Amazon and can be found HERE!
Calm Down Area And Seating Areas
The big orange chair is SOOOO comfy that it’s dangerous. IF you sit down it, you’ll never get up. Seriously ya’ll. I sit there and it makes me so sleepy and1 cozy. But it makes the PERFECT calm down area for the kids. The blue bag is a calm down kit from Kitful And Co. I LOVE these kits. The bag is filled with fidgets and calm down toys and cards for helping kids talk about their feelings! These are a must have for the classroom (and home if you have kids!) The other pic shows off some of the seating areas we offer and our sensory bin and light box!
Supplies And Storage
Community supplies are returning! You’ll notice the hand sanitizer jug. They will santize their hands before using supplies! The supplies will be sanitized daily with the steam sanitizer and Lysol throughout the day! We also got a new speaker system called a FrontRow Juno! It was funded by Reese Witherspoon through Donor’s Choose!
These are the cabinets in our room. This is where we store our art supplies, plates, napkins, utensils and cleaning supplies! These cabinets got a major purge a few weeks ago and let me tell you, I’m so glad I did it! So much more organized and so much more space. The clear containers are shoe boxes from The Container Store!
With so many cleaning supplies and PPE, I needed a way to store them and have them easily accessible! I saw this idea on Instagram (ya’ll, if you know who posted this please tell me so I can give them all the credit for this brilliant idea!)! These are recycling bins from The Container Store!
The classroom library is the first thing you see when you enter the classroom! It’s organized in a kid and teacher friendly way to it’s usable and accessible to everyone! There is a detailed post linked at the end of this post on how we organize the books!
This is the closet in our classroom! This also got a major purge this year. If I didn’t touch it for a year or so it went bye bye. Now there’s so much more space and I love it! But it won’t stay this clean for long! hehe
Here is a video tour of the classroom that shows all areas of the classroom and explains the room and how everything is used!
For more information, visit these posts:
To see our Amazon list of things for the classroom, click here!
