Turning a Room into a Learning Environment

After turning in my resignation, I immediately headed over to my school.  The first thing on my to do list was to figure out if the new bulletin boards were the same size as the ones I had become accustom to in my old building.  Lots of love and energy were poured into making my classroom decorations and I wasn't quite ready to change up our theme of chevron and owls, nor did we have much time until the first day of school....11 days to be exact!  

I was shown our new room.  Honestly all I remember is asking myself, what size are the bulletin boards?  (You know the first question any teacher thinks about when moving to a new school)  Relief settled in when I saw I had 2 boards, cabinets for storage and multiple windows...a commodity that I hadn't had the past 10 years!  

I must admit leaving a classroom, where the blue paint coordinated with the fabric perfectly was something I wasn't prepared for.  I wasn't prepared  for the fact that our new walls would have a set of huge red and black stripes around the room.  Despite being our school colors, all I could think of was my loyalty to TCU.  Every time I'd think of the stripes, I kept thinking of Texas Tech.  It was like a Big XII nightmare that I would face each and every day.  Thank goodness, I have a few TCU things hanging in our room!

Having spent the summer of 2013 watching my mother pour her heart and soul into creating fabric bulletin boards, complete with coordinating borders and pennants, I was determined to keep the same fabric.  After lots of brainstorming on what to do with THE stripes, a solution emerged.  We found coordinating polka dot fabric that would tie the red and black together with the turquoise and corral!

  

Nested Owls by Adornit

Now that fabric selections had been made and there would be no painting party to remove the stripes, I was ready to focus on how I would set up our classroom!  Most math teachers in our school have tables.  Much to everyone's surprise I was content with desks.  Desks allow for flexibility when it comes to grouping students for activities or assessments.  

Thanks to my awesome helpers, I was able to set up our classroom within a few hours on Friday!  

               

K adding polka dot fabric

Preparing our TI-84s

D assembling our new bookshelves

Love looking around our classroom, knowing how much time and energy was put into making our classroom ready for learning!