School Days

I can't believe my third week of third grade is almost over! The time has flown by! I am absolutely loving third grade. It's still so amazing to me to see all that they are capable of doing independently...I'm so used to the abilities of kindergarten and first grade students! I officially have 26 students in my class. I lost one somewhere before school started and I had another student move to Denver with his family after only 8 days of school, so he left as well.

My students absolutely love writing, which I am so excited about! I'm looking forward to all of the different writing projects we can do this year and all of the books I can have them "publish." I have been reading The BFG by Roald Dahl to them and they absolutely love it. Seeing their drawings of what they visualized the BFG to look like was hysterical.

I am so thankful for the school that God brought me to. It is such a positive work environment and the other third grade teachers have been so helpful in answering all of my questions! The students are great and their parents want to be involved (every teacher's dream come true!). So in other words, I am absolutely loving it!

Here's a little tour of my classroom:

Ready for the first day of school!

This is our classroom library, along with a display of
the students' work.

All of the storage space available in my classroom (yikes!)
and the kids' book bins. 

Guided Reading and Math small group table. The
purple bulletin board is a work in progress. :)

Writing Center with a bulletin board
of all of the writing options.

Daily 5 (literacy centers) rotation chart

A closer look at the Writing Center bulletin board.

Computer work station.

Word Work Center

So excited about my Boggle board!

Listening Center (still waiting on getting a
CD player so they can actually listen to stories!)

My desk

The front of the classroom. The students' "buckets" are
under the white board, math manipulatives are in the
colored buckets, and books and pillows are under the
white board, as well.

A close-up of their buckets. We read the story
Have You Filled a Bucket Today? and learned that
we can either be bucket fillers or bucket dippers.
The students write kind and encouraging notes
to one another to fill each others' buckets.

A view of the students' desks. We meet on the carpet in the
middle of them. It's hard to fit 26 desks in a classroom!

Each student has their own pencil cup so
that they don't have to dig in their desks for
crayons and pencils all the time. On the first
day, they had Lucky Charms and a note that
said "I'm so lucky to have you in my class"
waiting for them.