It's the final day of teacher week over at Blog Hoppin, and we are talking about our favorite subject to teach!

Reading is my very favorite subject to teach - If you want to read more about that you can check out my post on the Blog Hoppin blog today!

I did say I may have 2 favorites. Since becoming a second grade teacher.So I'm sharing my other favorite here!

As a general education teacher I've had the first opportunity in my career to teach science and I have to say I LOVE IT! Maybe almost as much as reading. I know that my students love it, and it's mostly because of the fun hands on lessons we get to do.

Right now we are learning all about the states of matter and Hope Kings unit is amazing! It's filled with engaging activities to help teach all the important details.

From day one I had my students attention when I pulled out a water balloon and a frozen balloon, they've been captivated during science every since! We made these colorful flip books to help us identify the different states of matter and record our vocabulary words.


It has different pictures for them to cut out and glue under the correct heading to identify what state of matter that particular object would be.

Then we took a look at what molecules look like in different states. The person wearing lots of balloons represents solid, the person with a few balloons is liquid, the person with just two balloons is gas. They jump around and watch the molecules move, or not!

They glued fruit loops to the recording sheet to represent how the molecules looked during each state.

I know they are going to be so excited today when they see bottles of soda and pop rocks candy on the science table! I have so much fun prepping for these lessons and can't get enough of the excitement they generate in my students. So science is also my favorite subject, almost right up there with reading!

What is your favorite subject? Come on over to Blog Hoppin and link up with us so we can see what gets you excited about teaching!

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It's Wednesday - I get to show you where I spend my week!


I kept the same color scheme for my classroom this year, but I did change a few things around.I'll try to give you as many details and I can, Let's start in the hallway!
These are the student lockers outside our door. I love the silhouette kids in Maria's Classroom and thought it would be a perfect fit for this area that I don't wan to have to climb up to change out. I teach at a Christian school and we have a Bible memory program. Each week students memorize verses, those verses are on the cutouts along the wall. When they memorize the verse they get a heart to color and it goes up next to that verse. The words say "Thy word have I hid in my heart..."

This is the door to our classroom, I made the welcome letters above the door and the 2nd grade sign. To the right is our work display board. I used scrapbook paper and clothes pins to make a quick easy place to display our work.. I got the "Great Job" and "Wow" dots from Dollar Tree.

Here's the view just inside the door...
The whiteboards are new this year, we replaced the old chalkboards and it brighten the room up so much! I've placed all our important reference posters above the board, Alphabet, Numbers to 20,and cursive alphabet. I created all of these last year. You can see under the board I have a gutter used as a books shelf. This year I decided to make some labels so that one end will hold new books, the middle is a place for students to put books they love and want to recommend to others, and the far end holds my favorite books. I'm loving the excitement It's generated already to have someone share a book and place it in the shelf.
One end of the whiteboard is serving as our math focus board and calendar wall. I love having everything magnetic for the calendar.

I've had a few questions about the baskets under my boards, I used these small baskets from dollar tree that have wire handles and binder clipped them to the ledge of the white boards, makes a great place to put magnets, markers, and erasers!

Here's our classroom library, my favorite area in the whole room


I used this board for our CAFE board last year, this year I'm using it more as a focus wall. the white rectangle is labeled "our thinking" and we use it to put all our sticky notes with our thinking about the story we read each week.  Our anchor charts are hanging here and the small pocket chart is used for vocabulary words. The blue small board to the left is for our author and genre study posters.

In the back left corner is my small group/teacher area. You can see on the back of the library book shelves I put hooks to hold our sight word reading cards and fluency phrases. The drawers behind my table are housing all the materials needed for each story in our reading curriculum plus my grammar units. I LOVE this organization system! It has been wonderful. 
In this picture you can see the shelf to the right, it holds my teachers guides, and paper trays for each day of the week where I store all materials for my lessons, the furthest shelf holds our student data binders/learning portfolios and our base ten blocks in the divided containers. 

Along the back wall I have two sets of these cubbies, this set is holding math manipulatives and math tubs. Underneath I have bins for our pillows we use during work time when we work around the classroom. This is helping keep them much more organized this year.

Here you can see the my filing cabinet, I'm using the side to display our bible memory verses. Above that is our birthday poster. To the right of the math cubbies is our student mailboxes and class rules.

The second set of cubbies on the other side of the mailboxes is where I keep our word work tubs and manipulatives. I am not using my teacher desk this year so I put it in the corner and got the stools from Family Dollar to put in front of it, ti makes a perfect work space for working on words. In the back right corner I have a smaller white board that I use to put spelling words on, the kids can also use it practice the words or with the magnetic letters. On either side of the board is our word wall. I laminated colored card stock and used it to make this -LOVE how it's working for us. Above the board we will display our vowel teams as we learn them. 

Between our word wall and our writing center there's the clock and our schedule goes in the pocket chart underneath. The basket on the wall holds all our schedule cards. I covered this table with contact paper and got the stools at Family Dollar. The binders on the table are our writing notebooks. We will display our writing anchor charts here, and the poster with the pencil on it is a part of Amanda Maddens writing notebooks packet, we use it to display the grammar skills we've learned.

Back around the the front of the room, this shelf to the left of the door holds all community supplies we might need. The tubs on the bottom have brooms and cleaning wipes in them, Our pencil sharpeners are on top. The clothes lines are holding pictures of us throughout the year, right now they have a family picture from each student that they brought to share. Above the door is a class poster that last years 2nd graders made it has each of their hand prints on it. To the right of the door we have our class helpers board, passes, and sanitizer/tissue station. The narrow drawers hold extra sanitizer and tissue.


When our door is closed you will see our class pledge and name tags we made on the first day of school.

Here's one last view from the back of the room facing the front! I really love how it all came together, it's functional and organized. I feel like we are making the most of all our space. 

I love looking at other classrooms if you do to head on over to Blog Hoppin and check out all the other teachers sharing their spaces today!

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