Teacher Created Resources ~ Classroom Pick Me Up and Step Into Spring Giveaway!

Decorating our classroom is a passion of ours. We spend an awful lot of time there, so we should love it!

Naturally we were delighted when Teacher Created Resources contacted us to offer a few of their new classroom decor items. Here’s what arrived at our door!

A box full of chevron and polka dots…which we adore!

We’ve had our eyes on two areas of our classroom that needed some serious TLC.

Our Guided Reading Area Before…

Our Calendar Board Before…

These two areas just needed a pick me up, and so did we…

Wow, bulletin board letters have come a long way since we first started teaching. Right? These lime green polka dot letters are the cutest letters we’ve owned.

We knew we wanted to use them for a calendar board quote, but it took us a bit to come up with the perfect fit. Being that we have an ocean theme going on in our classroom, this seemed the perfect way to dive into our day!

We love the crisp, clean colors of these chevron calendar cards. We laminated and cut them out so they will last forever!

The numbers are clear and large enough for our last row on the rug to read, which is important to us. They fit perfectly in our pocket chart calendar and the new headers are just our style!

We also used some of the chevron accent pieces and our Silhouette Cameo to add labels and jazz things up around our classroom.

Our Calendar Board After…

Our class will be looking forward to starting table points after Spring Break! We made a table points strip using one of the border pieces and the chevron accents. This was so quick and easy. We laminated the pieces so they can be dry or wet erase.

We made labels for our Workshop supply buckets too.

Our Guided Reading Area After…

We used the border and accent pieces to redo our guided reading area and we LOVE it!

We used our Cameo to make labels for our guided reading groups and supply boxes. Clean, crisp and at our fingertips!

We created reader response spots for our table by laminating the accent pieces so they are dry or wet erase. We stuck them to the table using masking tape and our first graders will use them to share ideas and answers during our guided reading meetings.

This was our favorite ah-ha moment…

We had 13 ugly black magazine boxes holding our guided reading books. They were fine…They do the trick…But, they were ugly.

We were standing in our kitchen one evening and it struck us!

R-E-A-D T-O S-U-C-C-E-E-D

Count those letters…

13!

Shut the ~~front~~ refrigerator door!!

Things got a lot more exciting when we held the lime green border up to the side of the magazine boxes to discover they were nearly a perfect fit! They needed a slight trim, but once cut down to size we just hot glued everything in place and there we had it…Our new guided reading organization complete with motto hiding all our our stuff!

We used more chevron accents to label some things around the classroom too.

We labeled our turn in boxes. Our green box means “go ahead and grade” and our blue box means “already graded, send me home”. We just cut the bottoms off the accent pieces to fit the boxes. Cute!

Our black tray is our walk in the door, catch all. Everything that comes through our door goes in the Black Tray. Why the name? It’s a black tray. Hahaha…Apparently our creativity has its limits…