Wednesday, August 24, 2011

More owls!

As promised, here are a few more pictures of my owl theme. I also promise I will be posting tomorrow or Friday with fun, free Spanish (and English) classroom printables and activities, so check back soon :)




Saturday, August 20, 2011

Everybody's got a theme


Hi all! As my very first blog posting I thought I'd start with the basics. Last year my classroom was cute, but it was missing one classic teacher touch - I had no theme for my room. For a first and second grade teacher that's pretty much a sin, so I got searching to find a theme for my room this year. At first I thought cupcakes (I have a minor obsession) but that was too girly. My next thought was crayons (I have a major obsession with Crayola) but I wasn't finding much variety. Finally, after a late night of weeding through Oriental Trading Company's ENTIRE teacher resources section, I found my theme. It was love at  first sight. Owls. I bought all the owl things I could through OTC and then widened my search to other teacher sites, Etsy, and even my Cricut machine. Here are the fruits of my labor.



This is my job board. I got this set by Carson and Dellosa from Oriental Trading Company and I love it! There is an owl for each student and little tree houses to put them in. Since this picture I have labeled each owl with the students' names and put my job titles on the lids of each tree house. I laminated this first so it would last longer, and it also added the nice effect of having a window instead of a hole in the tree. Click here for the owl job board


You can't miss my room from the hallway because you are greeted by my owl bulletin board and welcome sign on the door. These are both from OTC. Again, I laminated everything so I can keep this adorable theme for years to come!

http://www.orientaltrading.com/welcome-back-bulletin-board-set






I got this poster as part of a set from Oriental Trading Company (see here for the set). I just copied the little die cut owls and used them to make my daily schedule cards. I have a different set of these cards for each day of the week. I put little plastic pockets for each line using leftover laminate I had after cutting all these pieces out, but you could just velcro yours on.

You can't see the last picture very well (I'll try to take a new one soon) but they are owl buckets I made after being inspired by OTC. They had the picture of a finished bucket on their site, so I went to the Dollar Tree (my favorite place, holler!) and got sheets of felt and foam along with the colored buckets. I think I spent $5.00 total and now I have these super cute owl buckets.
Ok, well that's all for now. School has started for us already so I should get back to grading now. Since my room is all finished I promise I'll get more pictures and ideas up soon. You can look forward to lots of bilingual resources from me, since I wish I'd had more available to me when I started teaching. Just keep checking back. Thanks :)