What's on the Wall?

These photo's were taken in January the day before the Little Learners descended for Day 1 of Kindergarten so they really are the bare bones of my room.  However, they give you the general idea of the room set up.

First lets look at my Class Rules.  I use, standby and love many Whole Brain Teaching (WBT) techniques.  After watching a few free video's at wholebrainteaching.com.  I downloaded these cute rule posters for free from Pinterest then added some gingham backing paper, a little red card stock and laminated them.  I have a small A4 sized set in my class nook area that we run through every morning as a reminder of our rules.  The Little Learner's take turns in leading the class in rule gestures as they all chant them.  This definitely helps to reinforce the rules and the kids just love using gestures. Throughout the day I sometimes just perform a gesture relating to one of our rules and instantaneously the child is bought back into line without a spoken word.  Alternatively. I call out rule 3 or rule 2 and the Little learners all recite the rule aloud, continue working and the rule offender is brought back into the cohort without being singled out by name.  I plan to write a blog solely about these basic rules and how effective they really are in the future.  If you haven't tried WBT...you are going to love it!!!



Class Rule reminder



Next its the Birthday Wall.  Simple... yes.  Bright and cheery...yes.  The kids love to see their names on display and are always checking to see how many months until their birthday and who is having a birthday.  We have also used this information display to graph birthdays in our class.  We have used it to name the various colours, count the months, say the months in order, story spelling and of course it keeps me on red alert as to who has a special day coming up.  This too was a free download from Sparklebox. 

Birthday Balloons - months of the year chart

Special  Five Sound Houses. I have a sound house for each alphabetic letter.  The humming House, The Royal House, The Quiet House, The Noisy House and The Vowel House.  The divisions were not my idea but I did make up the roof tops and cards.  Eventually I will provide a link to these for anyone interested. I run through these each morning with the Little Learners and they seriously LOVE vocalising them in the appropriate tone.



Sound Houses



The Behaviour Clip Chart.  I down loaded this from Pinterest then mounted it on matching card stock and laminated each for durability.  I soaked some wooden pegs in yellow food dye and used a black marker to write each Little Learner's name on a peg.  The idea is to move the pegs up and down over the course of the day, week, term.  All pegs were in the starting position to start the year and now...well they are all over the place.



Behaviour Clip Chart & Colour words on Cats



The Coloured Cats surrounding the chart were a freebie from Sparklebox.  Having the names of each colour on the cat means the Little Learners can refer to them when writing as well as practise their colour word reading anytime.

Okay I admit there are quite a few more bits and pieces that we'll stumble across in due course but for now, if you have read my first few blogs, you will have a little understanding of where I teach and how I like things.

May our journey continue!

Mrs Stowe :-)