Classroom Reveal! Finally.

Tadaaa! It’s up! It’s finally up!

I started working on my room in July, and I barely took pictures to share last week! We kind of hit the ground running.

Remember, I am a literacy coach (this is my second year!). So my room isn’t a just-for-kids room; it’s a mostly-for-adults room, and sometimes I work with kids in it. But I believe that, in my role, I have to practice what I preach! And if I’m asking teachers to have organized spaces, sorted classroom libraries, and use anchor charts to reinforce learning, I have to do it, too!

Not only that, but I like a cheerful room. It’s where I spend a lot of time, so I plan my spaces as carefully as I did in the classroom.

This is the view from the door. The flower pens on the table are new this year! I made one for each of the teachers and then I made some extras for the tables! You can read about those here.

This is the front of the room. I have a dry-erase board where I make notes (mostly for myself) for when I plan with teachers. I covered my AV cart (it was hideous) and I posted the fall semester calendars vertically, so we can see what’s coming!

The “Teacher Feature” board is left over from last year – I’d like to try something a little different this year, like a Pinterest-themed board with pictures from our own classrooms, but I still haven’t figured it out yet!

This is the back wall. Because I’m a literacy coach, I divided up the wall into three sections: Fiction, Informational, and Poetry. When I build charts with the teachers, they go up here as a reference for them and for other grade levels, too!

This is the little corner behind the shelf of class sets of books. The Fiction Pocket Chart is a strategy we’ve used that I blogged about earlier this week!

The window holds cute stuff!

Our current Book of the Month is also featured here: Grandpa Green. Read about that here.

In the bright blue baskets, I have fiction books organized by reading strategy. These include Character Analysis, Predictions, Inferences, etc. These will help us plan for these strategies more efficiently!

This is the back wall from a different angle. Please ignore my giant box o’ books because they’re only there because I’ve been too lazy to take the box to the car.

In the white baskets on the bottom right shelf are fiction books organized by the genre we’ll encounter in the TEKS (our Texas state standards. No Common Core for us. In Texas, we apparently do what we want.)

There’s a basket of Biography/Autobiography (Literary Nonfiction), Multicultural (Theme & Culture), and Folktales, Legends & Myths.

Here’s the left end of the back wall. This is the informational text section (haven’t started planning for this yet) and the Poetry section. I’m going to share our Poetry sequence and anchor chart & tools soon! In the clear baskets are informational texts organized by procedural, good for main idea, and good for cause-effect instruction.

This is our Word Study section. We started our word study this year with a root word study and began building our anchor chart. The books on the shelves are class sets of picture books we use for shared reading. You can read about Word Study here.

This is the view from behind my Guided Reading table.

From the side of my Guided Reading table!

Tools are behind the table, on the bookshelves and on the wall.

This is the library space next to my Guided Reading table. On the walls are tools for writing planning; anchor charts we’ve built together about writing go here.

In the baskets on the shelves are books that are mentor texts for writing! I have them organized by what writing strategy they’re good for, such as “Careful Word Choice,” “Great Beginnings,” or “Shifting Point of View,”

I need new baskets, though. These were fine for novels, but they’re not really suited to picture books.

These baskets hold mentor author books. There’s Cynthia Rylant, Jane Yolen, Eve Bunting, and Patricia Polacco.

This is the wall next to the classroom library. It currently has our Writing Process map, but eventually I’ll place our sample anchor charts for conventions (grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization) here.

The table also houses the printer and the scanner (and required ancient computer which I ONLY use to operate the scanner. Everything else happens on the laptop.) I use the scanner solely for scanning the answer documents for our common assessments. Before they’re scanned, the answer documents go in the basket. After they’re scanned, I return them to the teachers in their boxes.

This is the whole room from the opposite end; near the Guided Reading table.

Here’s the wall by the door. The shelf is full of my grade level planning binders that have our district scope & sequence, the TEKS, released state tests, and our lesson plans that we create.

One of our plans this year is to have an optional book study where teachers can participate by reading and collaborating. Our first book is going to be Igniting a Passion for Reading by Stephen Layne and we’ll start it in October.

These filing cabinets hold 4 things:

1. Copies of the DRA/EDL Teacher Observation Guide for teachers so they don’t have to make their own. They’re in file folders by level, DRA first, and EDL after.

2. Ms. Beltran’s files (all of my stuff from teaching. My math & science stuff is boxed up, but I kept my reading, writing, and social studies stuff in case I can use it to help my teachers.

3. Shared Files: a new idea! The shared files will hold formats, tools, handouts, etc. organized by content. Teachers can add to them as they create or use things, and we’ll increase our bank of tools!

4. Assessments. We make a lot of common assessments and I’d like to organize them! So I’m housing them here.