Whew! We're wrapping up our first month down here in sickeningly hot and humid sunny Florida and I kinda sorta finally feel like maybe I have both feet on the ground. Personally, I had a weird start to the year. I'm always so excited to get in and start working on my room, but between having work done on our house, no AC at school (which in Florida equals sauna times a thousand), and an infected wisdom tooth, the first couple of weeks did NOT go the way I had carefully plotted and planned as I feel asleep every night over the summer.

Maybe you noticed that I didn't have a big "classroom reveal" post. Maybe you didn't, which I totally understand because sometimes I don't even have time to notice that I'm wearing two different colored shoes or that I've been wearing my shirt inside out all day. #truestory

My room didn't really come totally together until about 10 minutes before the parents came in for Open House on Wednesday, and even then it's not exactly what I want but really, the important thing is that we're building a nice little community in our classroom and I love love love love my kids. Like super love. Like I walk around the room and watch them sometimes and I'm almost on the verge of tears when I realize how lucky I am that I get to spend my day with such amazing little kids. I mean, look at them! See those sweet smiles? They're genuinely happy little kids. Which makes me a genuinely happy teacher. These faces are what help me forget the crazy political bureaucratic testing baloney that can threaten to overwhelm most of us on a daily basis.

Here's a little peek of the parts of the room that I did manage to get looking sorta like I pictured. I'll blog a bit more about my room at some point I'm sure. But I do like how our science center is shaping up and I'm really lovin the fact that I got rid of my big honkin teacher desk. Now I just use my horseshoe table and behind that you'll see the two Ikea Kallax bookshelves that I'm using for storage. It's working out really well so far!

Ok, so I promised Open House ideas. Here's what the tables looked like as the parents came in:

That lapbook was something I just stumbled upon on Tpt. You can see it here. Super cute and perfect for open house. The colored strip is for the parents to make a bookmark for their kids. The little poster is from my friend Gina at Beach Sand and Lesson Plans. The kids make a welcome poster telling the parents about school and their classroom and they don't know it, but we have the parents make a version to welcome the kids the next morning! You can see it here on tpt.

Kids Work:

Parent's Work:

And look at these priceless reactions when they saw the little notes from their parents on their desks.

Open House is the first time I put out the Estimation Station jar. Before this, the kids haven't seen it. They really get a kick out of seeing the guesses their parents made. We put their guesses in order from least to greatest and then see whose mom or dad came closest. That student then takes the jar home and fills it for the next week. You can read a lot more about how we use Estimation Station in our classroom every Friday in this blog post and this one which has a few freebies.

So things are slowly coming together in our little corner of the world. The decor in the room may not be picture perfect, but the little people in it sure are!

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Whew! Open House is Over! I stress myself out over Open House every year. I learned recently that some states up North call it Back to School night and then they have a different event called Open House at the end of the year. Just don't want to confuse any of my Northern peeps. If I succeeded in confusing you now, then my apologies! My brain might still be a bit scrambled from getting this all together...

So starting in the hallway before you come in, are two displays of student work. One is my What's in a Name Glyph bulletin board.  This one is my number one seller on TpT!

I also had a simple backpack glyph hanging on my cork strip. I only had about 10 school days with the kids before Open House, so I couldn't get too fancy schmancy with the projects. 

The glyph above comes from this book that you can find on Amazon. It actually has really cute and easy glyphs for just about every season or holiday. It makes for a great fall-back resource when you need something up for a new month with the quickness! You can download the glyph key I made to go along with it {HERE} from Google Docs.

Next, right inside the door is my new Wall of Fame bulletin board. I have wanted to do this forever! I'm going to use it to keep track of various student accomplishments during the year.

We have a superhero theme this year. The Mystery Word of the Day is fantastic and you can find it here on TpT from Hello, Mrs Sykes.You might think it looks a little pricey, but it is a year-long activity and each week contains 5 days worth of printable pages.

Just under that bulletin board is my cubby from Lowes. I finally made labels to attach to the bins which I've been meaning to do since I got the cubbies last year! You can download them too from GoogleDocs {HERE}. You'll need Powerpoint to open it. Those labels on the pencil cans are just something I whipped up from graphics from LetteringDelights.com. I don't have permission to share those (their licenses are kind of expensive!) but I may cave and buy that one soon so I can share the labels for a big pencil post I'm working on.

The project I had on the kids' desks was one I've used for a few years now. It's a two-pocket folder that I open up and then fold each edge to the middle making a cute little portfolio. It's a version of a lapbook and I think it makes a nice presentation. Again, with only a few days to work with the kids, I did the best I could!

Most of the stuff inside and the cover are from this book. I'm a big fan of this whole series.
In the big back pocket is a letter they write to their parents just telling what they like about 2nd grade so far and the things they want to be sure their parents see in the room. Behind that is a copy of my Helping Hands at School which you can download free from GoogleDocs {HERE}. I tried to make it more generic than the one I actually use but there are such differences between the way every school does things! Hope you can find some way to use it :)

On my window clothesline I had these adorable apples. We wrote about the "core" of the first story we read together Get Ready for Second Grade, Amber Brown. It was a perfect introduction to writing a summary and the display was super cute! I just printed the apples on red and green paper and we wrote the draft together. Did you know that you can cut construction paper to 8.5x11 and it goes right through your printer? It makes for great bulletin board displays! You can get the Core of the Story apple display freebie {HERE} from a brand new tpt seller, Gina! While you're at her store, don't miss the other cute Open House freebies she has up, like the beautiful bookmarks. She's one of my besties, so show her some love :)

Wow, are you still with me?? This is a long post, right? Ok almost done. I actually have a couple other things, but I think I'll save them. I don't want y'all to go cross-eyed on me. On the back bulletin board we had this really cute pencil display from A Cupcake for the Teacher which you can find here on TpT. I made a title for my board to print and cut (so much easier than individual letters!) You can download that free from GoogleDocs {HERE}.

I'm not sure if you can read Daniel's pencil. It says "To be a second grade success I will not hum because it drives the teacher looney tunes." Guess I made my point on that one, ha!

Ok friends, hope you found some useful ideas to start the year off on the right foot!

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SunnyDays

I've been using an Estimation Station activity in my room for years. I always start it at Open House with the parents and then it becomes a weekly activity in our room. I posted about the specific way I do it with the kids with some free printables right around this time last year. You can visit that post {HERE}.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to review the Estimation Station from Educational Insights so of course, I jumped on it! As usual, I debuted the activity at Open House. I put the jar out with directions for the parents near the sign-in sheets and such and have parents make the first guess of the year.

The next morning, we have our first Estimation Jar activity of the year in class. We take all of the guesses and order them from least to greatest. This year we used Post-it notes and we lined them up on the wall. This worked a lot better than using the scrap paper squares like I did last year. As you can read about in my original post,  we do a lot more with the numbers as the year goes on, but for the first time we just concentrate on ordering the numbers.

Another difference this year is the way we counted the items. I used to have the previous week's winner help me count the items, but the new kit from Educational Insights comes with a small scoop. The scoop will fill the jar 8 times. So now we have some options, for example we can count the number of items in one scoop and multiply it by eight (or add 8 times). I decided to use the scoop to give each child a few marshmallows and then had each of them count their little pile. Then I pulled up this online calculator and had each child tell me their number as I added it on the calculator. Next week, I'll let the winner work the calculator on the Smartboard.

I liked this method much better than having the whole class watch one kid count, especially when the jar actually contained over 400 marshmallows!! I may vary my method depending on the contents of the jar. Either way, the closest guess gets to take the jar home to refill for Monday to start the whole thing over again.

I updated my parent letter to send home to include the cuteness that is my new Estimation Station!
Click {HERE} to download from GoogleDocs. Again, you can see my old post for the original form and some other ways that I used the Estimation Station jar in my class.

I'm loving the upgrade from my original Dollar Tree jar to this kit from Educational Insights! Along with the cuteness factor, it comes with the scoop I mentioned for teaching how to use a benchmark to estimate. It also comes with a teacher guide that has lots of practical ideas and information as well as their own parent letter explaining the purpose of the jar and ideas to fill it. The top part of the jar separates from the base, so you can only send home the top portion with the winner. It's washable, which may come in handy! So, how would you like this super cute new Estimation Station jar for your classroom? The generous folks at EI are ready to give one to a lucky blog reader. Just enter using the Rafflecopter widget below. Good Luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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SunnyDays