Teaching Tuesday: Back to School Tour

Last week I was able to have an entire day to label and set up my room. Here is your virtual tour.




Welcome to The Purple Panda room. We are a room of old 2's and young 3's.

This is where we do all our large group learning. I have trays that we use when we are doing things right here on the floor. Every day during circle time we answer a question. This week we answered "How do you eat?" and they sorted food into spoon, fork or fingers.  I love this chart!

I added little labels all over the room. You can clearly see the cots one here. The very first locker is where I keep teacher circle time and large group activities. I also keep our carpet squares there.

My learning centers are small -- my room is small, so my centers need to be small. This is great for my kids because they are able to interact and engage. I keep things simple. I add as many theme oriented things as I can. Our theme at the start of the school year is All About Me, Family and Pets.  

Above my writing center are great things needed for the learning to write and read.. Like letters with phonic pictures and pre-primer Dolch sight words. They are able to use the chalkboard as much as they like and I have chalk available at all times.

This poster is actually one of my favorites. It is my "Theme in the Real World" It is pictures of families, kids and homes throughout the world.

This is my teacher supply corner. I spent a lot of time sorting and organizing this corner. This locker is also used to hold one of my 31 bags that I use to keep our week organized and my activities in one place. Also, every single thing I do has to be able to be broken down EVERY Friday. All organization must be portable, small and functional.

I love art. My kids love art. I have three art sections to my art center. The white table is our standing art space. This is where we mostly do our play dough. There is a drawing tablet on the wall for free drawing and the table for seated art work. Since my room can only have 7 kids I can usually just flatten the shelf and fit everyone around the table when we are doing large group art. These are end tables from IKEA.

Discovery and sensory is all about our Five senses during this theme. This area is a cramped so I am trying to find another solution.

We had a decent first week. I have found out things about them and they are learning their new environment.

I feel like we have not had enough interaction with the learning centers, and I feel like our centers time is much too long for this group, so I may be breaking things up some. Like moving our question of the day to the middle of center time and adding a second activity to it. Only time will tell. I have 2 new ones starting Monday so .... shall be interesting.

Let me know what you think! I love your comments.