Printing, printing and printing away!

I get super jazzed when it comes to getting ready for a new school year! I love imagining all of the things that I'll do with my fresh start! I love finding new posters to use to teach concepts, ways to improve small management tasks that didn't work well before, etc.

I've been printing up a storm to get ready for next year!  I've found some amazing things for my room next year on TpT and they're going to add some serious flair to my walls while also helping me provide great visuals while I introduce topics not only at the beginning of the year, but throughout the year as well.

Some exciting things in this picture:

• Daily 5 posters: these will be perfect for introducing my Daily 5 work expectations at the beginning of the year and after school breaks. The colors are gorgeous and the graphics are so cute.
• iPad Pass: I'm going to add these into my class Dojo store
• How to be a Friend: These are going to drive our class meetings for the first month! I always talk a lot about being a good friend and these will serve as a visual reminder while we get started.
• Mathematical Practice Posters: I LOVE these! We are always trying to keep students focused on the objectives and it can be hard to remember what we're really trying to get kids to be able to do. Having these up will help everyone stay focused on our mathematical practice objectives.
• Textual Evidence Frames: I can't wait to introduce textual evidence sentence frames with these posters! Then, they'll go up and stay up for reference throughout the year.
• Good Readers Do These Things Posters: I love that these came will reading response sticks. These will be a great addition to getting started in my small reading groups.

More Great Stuff:

• End of the Year Awards: My students LOVED these. Plus, the graphics on them are way too cute!
• Character Eduction Posters: These posters will drive my class meetings after we finish the "how to be a friend" section. We always talk about character education and what it means to be a good person.
• We Believe Posters: This is just a cute little inspirational poster set that I'm going to add to a dull corner of the room.
• Math Objectives: These objective posters cover our math learning goals and objectives for our first math unit of the year! Now, I can just pull out our objective for that days lesson and hang it up. Easy and pretty!

I Won a Grant!

I'm was new to my school district this past year so I didn't know what to expect when I decided to give it a shot and apply for the grant through our local education foundation. I spent the weekend writing up a grant application that I thought was perfect and a sure winner! I wanted around for quite some time before the winners were announced. In fact, I had forgotten that the winners would be announced soon at all when they showed up at my classroom to snap this picture of me with my grant award!

I wrote a grant for a class subscription to newsELA. Have you used newsELA before? If you teach 3rd grade or above, I would recommend checking it out. My class tested it out this year on a 30 day free trial and they loved it. What's even better is that I loved it too!

The site allows students to practice reading current, appropriately leveled texts on news topics that are interesting to them. They then take quizzes and write in response to their reading on the site. It's great practice for state assessments and it engages them in current events around the world. The students loved being able to track their quiz scores and progress and I loved having all of the data available regarding their progress and challenges. 

I can't wait to use newELA next year for the ENTIRE year.