Willy Wonka Classroom!

This was a real work in progress. I have a few tweaks to still finish but here is what I have done so far!

I ran a clothes line alphabet strip across the room for a 3-D effect. 

My CAFE and Daily 5 wall and part of my reading area. 

My door! Can you see my door? 

A shot of my window and my candy word wall tree! Are those gobbstoppers on that tree? (that's what they are supposed to be)

Here is more of my reading center. Notice my reading boxes for use during Read to Self, and Buddy Reading! I got those on amazon. I keep buckets of special books that are rich in color and vocabulary etc. Books like I Need My Monster, The Monstore and more. 

My listen to reading center from Daily 5 is in the middle of my two carpet areas. I have a bucket of CD books and books on tape. I am still gathering some chairs and setting up the equipment. 

I LOVE these! They were so easy and affordable to make. The crates are 3.47 at Wal-Mart. I bought 1 yard of pink satin material at Hobby Lobby for 4.99. I used old regular pillows and cut in half for the stuffing, they fit perfectly on top of the crates I hot glued the seams of the pillows. For the candy labels I printed off google images of candy boxes and laminated them. Then I backed them with construction paper for border. Thats it! GREAT seating! The kids LOVE them too!

My white board on this wall is unusable and waiting to be replaced at fall break. In the mean time it became the pocket chart wall! 

I am still finishing up my little corner!

I added Welcome Oompas Loompas and little men outside the door! I didn't take another photo yet, but I added twirly pops in between the oompas! I am adding a sign with all the kids names on the other side! 

That is most of the room. I have a few things I am tweaking. I finished adding border to two of my bulletin boards today for Wonka Writing and Reading Land! Enjoy! I hope you like my ideas and they foster some ideas for you too! 

Awesome High Frequency Word Activity!

I came up with a great practice/review activity for high frequency words. You could use this activity to review anything though! Math facts, spelling words etc! I took balloons and blew them up small, about the size of water balloons. I used a sharpie and wrote my HFW for the week on them. My students are set up in six tables of four students each. I started with table 1 and started handing them balloons, each student had to read and say aloud the word then pass it to the next person. When everyone at the table had done it, they passed it to the next table. I kept giving them balloons until I was out and then I had them continue to pass balloons until they had completed it three times! They LOVED it! There was giggling and a little bit of dropping balloons on the floor but overall they handled the activity very well! This is a great way to engage them and to get kinesthetic, visual and audio learning all in one! All the balloons will go on my word tree in my room! I will use this activity again for math facts and more!

My Tree.....