Week One and Two

So I am a little late with my next post...better late than never is my motto. Chris has successfully finished his second week of school and he is loving every minute of it. The Lord has truly blessed him with a great group of kids this year. For the first full week of school Chris did more activities that helped the class get to know each other and what to expect in the classroom. Last week Chris also had Parent night for his class. He was a little nervous about the night especially after talking to some other teachers who were very organized with their material for the parents. So once again Pinterest comes to the rescue and the night went really well. The second week Chris started introducing the curriculum, according to him this made the days go by faster because everything was scheduled out. One cool thing they did this week was make a time capsule and planted it behind the school. All the kids brought something to put in that was meaningful to them and when the school year is over they will dig it back up. Chris brought a sonogram picture of our baby boy. Sadly I don't have any pictures to post of the kids burying the capsule. 

One activity Chris had the students due the first week of school. He brought shaving cream and had certain words he wanted the kids to spell. They really had a lot of fun!

The classroom set up for Parent Night! The kids did an amazing mural on the chalkboard wall.

One of the Pinterest finds. I thought it was so cute.

I found this idea on another teachers blog. She had the kids write 10 facts about themselves, 5 obvious ones and 5 not so obvious ones. She put them up and parents had to guess which one was their child. 

At every child's desk the parents found a thank you card from their child as well as the popcorn and some forms that give an overview of the classroom objectives and policies, as well as volunteer sign up sheets for parents. 

Chris also played Jeopardy with the kids the first week of school. I felt bad for him because he had done the whole thing on a powerpoint but he wasn't able to get his projector installed on time. The game just helped give the kids a review on all the new classroom policies and procedures they had learned during the week.

A close up of that awesome mural!

Another great little activity Chris did with the kids the first week of school. 

The "Reach for the Stars" bulletin board with the hands actually on it. 

 

Another one of our Pinterest finds for Parent Night.

Classroom Overhaul

My name is Rachel Bispham and I recently married my best friend Christopher Bispham who just happens to be a teacher. I however, am not a teacher. I had the crazy idea of going into nursing and although there are aspects about it that I love I have always had a passion for teaching. A lot has happened since my husband and I have been married, we are expecting a little boy in November! And to make things a little more exciting for us we decided to move to California where my husband is teaching 7th grade. All while this is going on I am currently trying to finish my bachelor's degree online and study for my nursing boards. Because of our recent move I have had the fun task of helping my husband get his classroom ready for school which began today! I cant tell you how much fun I have had looking over Pinterest for hours and hours finding fun bulletin boards and different classroom layouts. I have decided that if I can't live my dream of being a teacher right now I will have to live vicariously through my husband. Here are few pictures of his classroom.

The classroom before...

Another before...

My husband chose the green and yellow since he's a huge packers fan, but I think it came out amazing! Underneath the white board we wanted to do some sort of timeline so we came up with a timeline that can add pics of the kids throughout the school year. We just used black electrical tape from the dollar store and pictures of the different months that the previous teacher had left. 

The wall behind my handsome husband is a chalkboard wall so the possibilities are endless. I think my favorite part of the room is this think differently wall. It was all my husbands idea I just rolled with it. He found all the pictures in his classroom closet which was a promotion from Apple and since they are really trying to implement technology in the classroom it was perfect. And he has a little activity for the kids to see how many of the people in the pictures they know and to go home and research a bit about them, its amazing how some kids have never heard of Gandhi! We also made a simple little board with random facts about Chris and some pictures for the first week of school. 

What is so nice about his classroom is how many bulletin boards he has to display things. We were not sure how we wanted to use all of them because he learned in school that for the first few weeks you don't want to overwhelm kids with a bunch of subject boards. So we tried to make most of them just fun interactive boards. Since he teaches at a Christian Private school we thought we should have at least a designated Bible board. I wanted to do something with superhero's so we came up with this concept. He stapled the figures and he's so proud of their positioning. Lol 

This is a math interactive board that I had found during my numerous hours on Pintrest.  Since his first lesson in math is about integers its perfect. But he's going to adapt it a bit to more their level and make it into an interactive board. Eventually there will be frogs leaping and greater than or lesser than signs. I'm just glad I don't teach math. 

This board will be amazing when its all done! The Idea is to have the students make cutouts of their whole hand and forearm. And on the forearm they will write what their goals are in life. Its entitled, "Reaching for the Stars". All the stars on the board are those glow in the dark one's that everyone use to have as kids on their bedroom walls. His mom sent us a package with them in it and they worked out amazingly! Thanks Mama G!

Of course Chris had to have a little display of all his Packer gear and his trophies! We painted all the bookcases white and everything looks so much cleaner than it did before. 

And of course the Facebook Wall. Lots of classrooms are now making twitter or instagram walls so we had to go with the flow. The kids can fill out the wall and info parts with post it's with things that talk about maybe what their learning or how their feeling that day. This way the parents can also keep track of whats kind of happening in the classroom. 

This is another project I had so much fun doing. Chris still wanted to have jobs for the kids, but coming from 5th grade to 7th grade he wasn't sure how to make it and still be age appropriate. So I found a board similar to this and we already had the perfect boarder and another teacher had the library pockets. All we got were some colorful popsicle sticks and had at it. Every kid has to put their name in a slot and most jobs have a limit of two people. This way they can be more independent in picking the jobs and take more responsibility in the classroom. 

This board was so much fun as well. We bought all the frames at the dollar store and just added a subjects name in colorful paper. The goal is for Chris to write down what the learning objective is for each subject for that day or week. Hopefully it will help the kids be more informed and more focused. The other sheets are just his class schedule and the homework assignment sheet that kids have to fill out each day. 

This board was created for the kids so they know what they can do when they are finished with an assignment. Hopefully it will prevent Chris having to tell them what they should be doing when their done so help with his sanity! 

The class motto that Chris picked is, "What is easy is seldom excellent". I think its pretty perfect!

The view of his whole classroom

Just a closer up view of his packer gear, need I say this causes some tension in our marriage being that I'm a huge Patriots fan. I tried to sneak my Pats hat up there but I couldn't manage it.