Around the classroom!

Unlike most classrooms that are in buildings that are designed specifically for schools our classroom is a little different.  Our classroom is located on Capitol Park in downtown Tuscaloosa in the oldest wooden structure building in Tuscaloosa county.  So our classroom might look a little "different", but I love it and think it gives our room a lot of character!  Another aspect I love about our room is when you walk in your focus is not immediately drawn to the building, but rather the students!

Calendar Area

When you first walk into our classroom this is the wall on the left.  It is our "calendar area".  In addition to the calendar, we keep track of the weather, how many days we've been in school, and we have a daily schedule posted.  Due to the numerous activities our school offers, our class schedule is different each day so having the daily schedule posted helps keep the students (and us teachers!) on track!




To the right when you walk in our classroom you will find one of our "shelf work" areas.  Since we teach all of our students individually, and do a lot of small group activities, we have a lot of work set up in the classroom that the students can work on independently.  This allows all of the students to be working, while Margaret and I pull individuals or small groups of students to work on specific areas they need help with.  Even though all of our activities are not 100% Montessori, a lot of our activities follow several of the Montessori principles.  For example with shelf work....the work is on trays and the students pick up a tray, take it to their seat, do the work, and when they are finished the put all the work back on the tray and return it to its "home".

shelf work area

On another wall we have our classroom "library".  Here we have several books from picture books, to leveled readers etc.  Each day we read with each child individually.  This is a very important part of our day and we feel it plays a vital role in students learning to read or further developing their reading abilities.  Each year we teach a wide range of students with a wide range of reading abilities.  This year, for example, we have some students that were still learning all of the letters to some students that are reading on 5th, 6th, and 7th grade.  We guide the children to the right range of books by telling them to pick a book that's "not too hard and not too easy", but they get to choose the actual book.  This can become a challenge for some of our more advanced readers.  Even though some of our students are reading on a 7th grade reading level....they are still six or seven years old and therefore still enjoy reading books geared for that age.  In this we try to compromise between having them read books that challenge them and ones that interest them.  We want our students to not only read well, but to love reading.  We don't ever want reading to feel like a hardship for the students.  

our class books

Our Montessori bead cabinet

This is a picture of our Montessori bead cabinet.  I won't go into much detail here because I am going to save our Montessori items for another post, but we use this for teaching math.  It is fantastic and the kids seem to really enjoy using it!

On the back wall of our classroom we have our computers and T.V.  We have six Mac computers that the students use each day.  Not only do the students love working on the computers, but there are such great websites that are available now that the internet has become such a great teaching tool.  One website that the students use each day is called Raz-Kidz.  The school has a subscription to this website and it is a great reading tool.  The students can read books, have books read to them and take post "test" to see if the students are comprehending what they are reading.  Our T.V was recently donated to our classroom and it is a great teaching tool.  The T.V is connected to the internet so we are able to show online videos.  For example this month, January, we have been learning about snowflakes. The students were able to watch a great video about the book Snowflake Bentley (the man that first took microscopic pictures of snowflakes).

World Rug Area

Our room makes an L shape and this is the bottom of the L part of our room.  It is hard to tell in this picture but there is a large rug on the floor that has a map of the world on it.  We call this area the "world rug".  This space is used for when we have "class meetings" or read our lifeskill books together.  In the back left corner we have a large block table where the students can play with wooden block.  To the right is the bathroom and sink area.

And that is a tour of our classroom!  Sorry if some of the of the pictures seem blurry.  I took them on my phone while trying to keep the kids out of the pictures so it was a bit difficult!