Tuesday, September 1, 2015

My Shiny Room is Ready for Kids

I took the summer off from writing my blog.  I still continued to read Twitter and blogs and got a lot of fresh, new ideas for the school year.  I am very excited for the kids to report tomorrow.  I came in all 5 mornings last week and then we had 2 full days this week to get ready. 

Here it is:

My room from the door.  I love my room.  It is a corner room with 3 windows which means it gets really hot in the summer (like now when it is 90+) and really cold in the winter, but I love it!

Imagine my surprise when I walked in last week and saw a beautiful projector mounted to the wall. Ahhhhh!  I am in love!  I have since been able to get hooked up to it.  It projects a huge picture - about 5 feet wide.  It would make a great place to watch a movie.  It also allows the sound to go right through it.  It is high so I have remote.  Some teachers share my room and I don't want to lose the remote, so I added some velcro to the back of it. 

Next is my desk nook.  This is my 11th year teaching and my first year not sharing a room.  That means I earned more corner desk space and an additional closet.  Yippee!

My desk:
My computer.  We did get Apple TV as well, so once that gets hooked up, we will go wireless!  What an exciting year!
My new favorite decoration comes from last year's student work.  They had to make a picture using equations and constraints in desmos.com.  I love having these pictures up and telling my new algebra 2 kids that they will be doing that in the spring.  They don't believe they will be able to, but they will!  It is great incentive.  I didn't know how I could get them all hung on the wall to actually stay on the wall, so I bought Command strips and grabbed some clothesline and pinned the pictures up. 
I love having my monthly calendar at the back of the room so I can see it and refer to it.  I made it a little smaller this year to leave more room for students to work at the board.  I am lucky to have whiteboards at the front and back of the room.
And, finally, this is my bulletin/cork board with some old and some new.  I made a 3x3 ft Sudoku puzzle with 12x12 in scrapbook paper and index cards to make little pockets to hold the numbers.  I wanted something interactive.  I also have the two older things from past summers to the right - the standard equations for transformations and the mindset poster.  Up above I have my textbooks, old catapults we make in Algebra 1.  To the left, I have my student center to sharpen pencils, get tissues, and sign out.



That's my room.  Bring on the kids!