Last week, after painting my old room, my principal gave me the option of moving to a larger room. I jumped at the chance to have more space for students to be actively engaged in learning. In my old room, the furniture took up the ENTIRE space and students were always seated at their tables while in the room.  I am sharing this larger space with our school service providers.  Sharing the space will definately have some challenges of balancing volume between the rooms so that my group isn't too noisy while they are doing assessments etc.  However, I think the benefits of the larger space will outweigh any challenges that we encounter.    I had planned to decorate my door to welcome students but with the shared space, I felt it wouldn't be right to do this.  So, instead, I am temporarily using the bulletin board over my desk for this purpose.  After back to school night, I'll change this board to support learning happening in the classroom. 

   I am quite excited about how the new space turned out. I love the reading corner with the two bulletin boards hanging over the book cases.  You can grab a copy of the CAFE headers at my TpT account.  Since I teach 1st - 5th grades I needed to have a way to display the learning goals for each grade.  I purchased a set of Illustrated CCSS goals here and then created nautical themed headers. 

In the other corner of the room is a set of bookcases containing all of our art and writing materials on the left and math manipulatives on the right.  Between these two areas is a window with a student computer.  Posted on the wall near the computer is the Edmodo Digital Citizenship poster, a Think before you post poster, and a poster with a list of websites that students will frequently use.  On the wall next to the black bookcase is a portable Smartboard.  I am lucky to be it's home base.  Other teachers will be checking the Smartboard out but I will have the opportunity to use it as well. 

I have room for three small round tables to seat 12 students and still have floor space for meeting space around the Smartboard and floor space for projects, games, and other activities. 

I hope the students love the new room as much as I do.