The Road to a Ship Shape Classroom (post 2)

It's finally Friday and I'm finally updating my Ship Shape Classroom post to show you guys what I've been up to. I've been to my classroom several times since my last post and it's really beginning to have a cohesive look! It's still a work in progress, but here's what I've done so far.

1. organized my manipulatives into matching bins and sewed new curtains

2. Swapped out my alphabet with a pirate themed version and changed my AR goal border.  I also made cute pirate hat magnets for my students to use to track their progress each week.

Isn't it adorable?!

3. Updated my bulletin boards

This one is going to be my classroom jobs board.  I still have to add my little pirates and their job tags around it though.  I found the pirate ship at a local party store.  YAY for not having to create one from scratch!

student work display

AR promotion I'm trying out this year (still needs pockets added beneath each card)

Word Wall

Pre-planning starts next week so I plan to finish up then, but I'm excited and relieved to have most of the decorating finished.  It will be nice to use my pre-planning time to actually plan ;)

The road to a 'ship shape' classroom: Day 1

Ahoy there, Mateys!

I'm so excited about transforming my first grade classroom over to a pirate theme!  I went to my room today for a few minutes to get started "swabbing the deck" and decided to take some before pictures so that I could share the step-by-step process with you!

Goal of the day: set up desks!

We'll start with these two pics....

These are just a couple views of the main seating area of my classroom before I got started. 

And after.....

I decided on an 'X marks the spot' formation. I felt that it fit my pirate theme and still allows for small group assignments so I'm pretty happy with it! :).  I'm love rearranging my desks as the year goes on to keep things fresh and discipline problems down (sometimes all kids need is a swapped seat). What are some desk arrangements that you guys like?