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Friday, February 10, 2017

Moving Into My First Classroom

It has been a few months (okay half of the school year) since I started working at my school and I'm finally posting photos of my classroom! The school I was hired at this year has been going through plenty of changes, and plenty of construction. I was lucky enough to be placed in a classroom in our school's new two-story English and Math building, so I got a fairly large classroom with a modern, 21st-century style to it -and the furniture to match! The classroom was pretty plain and empty when I first got it, and to be honest, I was hesitant to even decorate it because it looked so clean and polished!

After about a month or so, I ended up spending around $1000 😬 on school supplies, furniture and little knick-knacks to decorate it a bit. Even after spending all that money, I still didn't have much to decorate the walls with. I was so excited to have an entire cork board style wall, but I never realized how hard it would be to decorate it since the canvas is so huge. Was I supposed to put up posters from the floor to the ceiling? It was so tough to even think about. $1000 in and I still didn't even have any posters. I later spoke to a veteran teacher on campus, and she said "The cheapest and most creative way to decorate your classroom is to use your students' work as decoration." So I got to work-or at least my students did. After a while of fun and creative assignments, I had some pretty colorful work to start filling the walls with! I spent a lot of time on Pinterest to get some ideas, and I cannot tell you how hard it is to find classroom decor for high school on there! They were all elementary school decor ideas! So I went with it! I decided to grab some streamers, in all rainbow colors, and create a rainbow under the whiteboards to really make the room come to life without seeming to baby-ish! I must admit, they turned out so well! I originally started off with rainbow streamers going down each of the whiteboards, but unfortunately with so much student movement, they ripped very easily and I had to take down the whole set in the back. I ended up grabbing some painted pictures from the school's gymnasium after one of our pep-rallies, since they were so darn cute, and stuck those around the class as well to really pull the rainbow theme together.
     Since I'm still a first year teacher, it's far from perfect. I'm still collecting work as I go, and it's definitely still a work in progress, but what do you think so far? I'll have more photos for you as the end of the school year approaches, and I'll definitely go into more specific details in a later post, so be sure to subscribe and stay tuned!🍎🍏📚📖 
-Amanda Teaches

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