Back to School 2014 - Pictures of my new space!

As I write this, I am one week away from the teachers' back to school week and two weeks away from the first day of school.  I spent the better part of today in my classroom removing a gazillion staples from the walls and putting up a few decorations.  Now that the room is pretty much under control, I can get my head wrapped around the unit/project/lesson planning!

I LOVE this "wordle."  I found this on Pinterest and added my own spin to it by printing the words out onto American Girl scrapbooking papers (11x11", cut down to 8 1/2x11" to fit in my printer).  I then cut them out, and mounted them on various colors of construction paper borders.  The original idea/blog post was found here.  There is a link included to a Google Docs page with the words ready to print!  

Since this is a new classroom and a new grade level for me, I need to go through the bookshelves to see what I have in my classroom library.  I set up a Goodreads account with my school email address (so it's a separate database from my personal reading list).  Tomorrow I will spend some time scanning each of the titles in my library to Goodreads and placing them on a new virtual shelf titled, "5th Grade Classroom Library."  This way, I will have a place to go to see the full database of books already belonging to my classroom!  Too bad Goodreads doesn't have a way for me to use their site to check books out to students.  Maybe someday?!