Welcoming Friends

My great love for Mo Willems is pretty well known. Our librarian is certainly aware of it. When Mo Willems' books begin to fall apart in our library, as they often do, she orders new copies and passes the deteriorating ones to me. I cut out fun pictures of the characters and hang them up around our room with speech bubbles. If they aren't already, they will soon be faithful friends for my students.

I got home and looked at these pictures and realized that should be a question mark there. I'll fix that. This picture of Elephant Gerald is beside our calendar.

Duckling is on our AC/heating unit, right beside our main meeting area where we will have our morning meetings.

Pigeon is just above our computers. He looked a bit smug to me, something about the wing pointing at his chest. Of course, smug is probably the way Pigeon seems a lot.

Last year I got a two-drawer filing cabinet that I plan to use for work stations. I can keep the materials inside and the kids can use the sides for magnetic activities and the top as a desk/table. We'll see how it goes.

I love all these excited pictures of Elephant Gerald. I could have used pictures of just him all around the room. This one is above one of our library bookshelves.










Our Wonder Table is just inside the door of our classroom. I love that the first thing people seen when they walk in is a bunch of interesting stuff on a table. Pigeon loves it too.

Trixie here is beside the desk we have for when kids need a break. The desk is available for other purposes, but it's always good to have a dedicated spot for when students just need a few minutes away from everything else. Trixie should help them smile.

These pictures of Piggie, Elephant Gerald, Pigeon, Duckling, and Trixie all make me smile. They are so wonderfully drawn that they elicit a smile no matter what. Piggie sits above our math manipulatives shelf.













The white board speech bubbles will be easy to change throughout the year and that is my plan. I hope I'll change the others as well. It will be interesting to watch my emerging readers work on these because I think they'll want to do so.