Classroom Set Up

It's a new school year, and as always the summer has refreshed me and left me excited and ready for the new school year. You might think I'd be sad about have to down-size my room space, but I'm actually thrilled about my new room! My former room was almost too much space - sounds strange, I know, how could there be too much space? But somehow it made it seem like I was farther away from my students and in that way made it more challenging to manage.

I absolutely love my classroom this year! I think it's my best room design yet. Here are some of the photos I shot before the kiddos arrived; it looks a little more "lived in" two weeks into school.



My classroom library with books arranged by genre/reading interest.



Make-up work wall, where students can get the hand-outs and information about the previous days' lessons.



Our student work books and some writer's notebooks - still waiting for the rest to come in!


Bookmarks for students.


Student writing folders.



Sticky note sentence strips. Students will write words for the word wall on these. Although I hadn't realized it when I set up my room, this has since become my "Is It Yours?" spot where students can reclaim lost materials or no-name papers.


"Take a Break" chair, where students go when they need to refocus. They can go of their own volition or when I ask them to, but it's not a punishment; just a place for them to re-center.


Reading Corner for when students finish classwork.


Quote of the week and the week's plan posted here.


Student desks are arranged in groups of four with one remainder group of two.




I post student jobs, the unit's essential questions, the date (and Happy Birthday messages), learning targets and the agenda here.


"Help Yourself" wall where students can take regular hand-outs or resources to help them improve their writing.


Place to display exceptional student work, a place where students can get resources on how to publish their work, and an "About You" wall where students will decorate the bulletin board with pictures that show us who they are - like a show and tell. I did the first one with pictures from my life and my eighth grade report card that my mom had stored in her basement. The kids always ask, "Ms. Yost, how could you get a C in gym?" *Sigh* Memories of falling off monkey bars and walking the mile...


My desk with pictures and artwork of former students behind me.


Word Wall: "Highfalutin Words" (or academic words that students may not be familiar with), "Spicy Words" (or precise words that could improve our writing), and "Bad Words" (or informal words and trendy spellings that students may use casually, but that aren't appropriate for formal writing.)

New Common Core Standards: *Gulp!*

Our first day is tomorrow, though the kiddos don't return until Monday. We're scrambling with paper and bordette and little cut out letters and glitter and rosters and name tags and...what's this? New Common Core Standards?! Kentucky, like forty-six other states, adopted these national standards in an effort to win Obama and Duncan's Race to the Top. While Kentucky was not successful in this aim, we still won a great opportunity to completely overhall our instruction in English language arts and math.

I was fortunate to have worked with the new standards last school year and during the summer for the Gates Foundation's Common Core Curriculum Mapping Project. I created a curriculum module for writing monologues aligned with the standards. More important than this prestious opportunity was the chance to "get my hands dirty" so to speak, and really dive into the standards. While they are impressively rigorous (sixth graders are now to type three pages in one class sitting, for example), they are also clear and well organized, and will make standards-based grading, data driven instruction and alignment of learning targets with assessment much easier. They also bring reading and writing accountability into the science and social studies classrooms, which will reinforce the notion that the strongest teachers already believed - literacy underlies success in all text-based content areas.

The curriculum I followed last year and will follow again this year is the College Board's SpringBoard program for middle and high school students.

The SpringBoard program is already aligned with the common core, though I didn't realize the standards alignment was accessible online. No, instead I thought it would be a good idea to spend four hours mapping the first unit of instruction in alignment with the new common core; still I'm glad I did as it prepared me for the instruction.

After mapping out the curriculum, my colleague and collaborator, Ms. W, and I planned two ways to pre-assess the students initially. First in literary reading, then in language, or grammar. We would administer a reading test to them with questions directly aligned with the literary reading standards and use a checklist to identify whether students were demonstrating, developing, or not demonstrating the skill. Likewise, with the language standards, we developed a checklist and plan to use analyses of their writing to determine whether or not they've mastered the skills.

Because the pre-assessment contains some copyrighted material, I'll just share the checklists here.

Language Standards Checklist

Literature Reading Standards Checklist

Armed with hard copies of the standards, web resources, plans, pre-assessments and these checklists, I'm hopeful that these new standards will prove as an opportunity to radically improve and tighten my instruction. I'll let you know how it goes!

Power at Our Fingertips: Google Docs in the Classroom

For one of my classes this summer, I had to research and present on a technology that could be used to enhance instruction. Google Doces has so many applications for language arts and other content areas - check out Google for Educators for some amazing ideas.

Here is the PowerPoint for my presentation; ironically not created in Google Docs. (I suppose because this was a solo project and not a collab.)

YostS_TechnologyPaper.presentation.powerPoint - Copy

In another class, I did a lot of work with Google Docs myself. The work included creating a project proposal in collaboration with other people in the class, creating a survey, documenting the results, and creating a presentation of the survey results and our analysis. This inspired me to begin this year by keeping track of student data with a Google Docs spread sheet. I have very little experience with Excel to begin with, so I'm sure the learning curve will be sharp. Still, I think the technology will help me stay organized, and with only two classes of students this year while I work on my MS LIS, it will be the perfect time to experiement.