Classroom

Here are the last of the pictures I took before school started.  I'll have to get some new ones soon.  Tomorrow we are going on a field trip to the Boston Tea Party Museum!

 Our tool bag for woodworking

 This year instead of having them just play with the legos during Creative Design, I found these Lego Quests for them to accomplish each week.  Legos used to be one of my top centers.  This year since I introduced the Lego Quests, they haven't been used once!  Oops!  I think the quests are fabulous.  Here's a link:  Lego Quests

This bulletin board was a Pinterest find and I thought it was great, but we aren't using it at all yet because I can't seem to make it work.  You are supposed to put a topic/person and the students write questions where that topic/person is the answer.  It might work better for people, but I can't seem to make it work for a topic, such as the Revolutionary War.  Sure, there are a few questions they could ask, but not that many...I might need to utilize this space in a different way.

These are our class rules this year.  We read them every morning and we customized Class Dojo (our classroom management website) to coordinate with these.  Let's be honest, we don't read them every morning, but we're going to start now because I think that's a great idea.  And the Class Dojo implementing of these rules didn't work that well because positive behaviors were easy, but for some of these rules it is difficult to come up with the "needs work" behavior.  What's the opposite of "We have fun", we don't have fun?  Seems like a strange thing to get penalized for, so we tweaked it and added back some of our old
Class Dojo behaviors from last year.

Let's call this post, awesome classroom ideas that failed. :)