Where It All Goes Down...

Well, I'm 15 days into school and my classroom is a hot mess! has that nice "learned in" look.  I got in like 6 sets of new textbooks last week and I have 28 kids so there's NO EXTRA SPACE.  Seriously, if I get any more stuff, I don't know where it will go!  So I'm going to take this opportunity to share some pictures of the Project CHILD elements in my classroom.  (Project CHILD highlights...we work in "clusters" of 3 teachers, each specializing in a content area, we keep our kids for 3 years, and our kiddos work in stations daily.)  Here are a couple quick pictures of the whole shebang:

Every day, our kids go to stations.  (In the pictures above you can see the station signs hanging from the ceiling.)  They choose their station using the station assignment board:

They can go to computers, textbook (paper/pencil activities), teacher (small group instruction), challenge (a game), exploration (working with manipulatives), construction (cut and paste activities), or to the library.  Our library is free flow, so we don't have a set time each week.  They can go whenever they want!  Students choose their own stations.  They LOVE this!  The same activities are at each station for two weeks, so they usually have time to get to everything.  They record where they've been on their Passports:

I keep my station materials in tubs.  Each grade level is assigned a color and that color stays with them from kindergarten through fifth grade.  That way they always know which set of station tubs to use.  This is how I keep my tubs organized: 

Something new that we added last year is a College Station.  We work really hard to make sure all of our kids know that they WILL go to college.  Every year, all of our students go on a college tour.  Our kindergarteners go to the local community college and every year they get farther from home until they get to make the big trip to the University of Kentucky in fifth grade!  It's really exciting and so awesome to see my babies on a college campus.  But we decided to do a college station to help our kids explore more about college, the application process, campus life, etc.  Here's a picture of my college station (it's totally cramped and yes, I have a lot of STUFF!):

I'll share the activity that our kindergarteners do (because that's the one I made!).  This is based on the "road" to college.  We were supposed to tie in our content (math!), so I made it a patterning activity.

You can download it here.

I'm off to check out {and drool over} all of the other Blog Hoppers' classrooms!