First weeks of school & Math manipulatives management!

Happy Saturday friends!! I am currently blogging from my hubby’s office.. Not my idea of a relaxing Saturday morning, BUT we have a wedding to go to this afternoon close by, and this was our best option! 🙂

I am here today to share my new little trick for management in my classroom: table trays!

My classroom came with awesome cubbies/storage shelves. I have been using them to store centers and manipulatives so far. I found these adorable trays in the dollar spot at Target over the Summer, and knew that I wanted to use them somehow in these shelves as well! I bought one for each table. ( I have 8 groups of 3 or 4 kids) and put each table number on them. Here’s what my storage shelves looked like at the beginning of the year:

It’s not quite as organized/labeled as I would like, but this year is a work in progress for me! New district, new school, new grade level.. just trying to take things a day at a time, right??

So, this week, I decided to start using my table trays for Math. My district has adopted a common core math program that comes with a ton of goodies, both online and in student manipulative form. My team decided to make workmat file folders for our kids and laminate them so that they could be reused. Thank goodness that my mom was willing to help me glue the workmats onto the file folders AND cut out the laminating too!!

We were working on combinations of numbers this week, and in addition to needing their workbook pages, my kiddos also were supposed to use their workmats and two sided counters.. oh man!! This is a TON of supplies for a first grader to manage. So, table trays came in very handy!

If you look below in table one’s box, you can see that I put their workmats inside, and gave each child a bag of 10 counters. The table captain of the day, is in charge of going to get the tray for their table before we get started.

The tray sits in the middle of their table while we get our workbook pages ready, and while I introduce the lesson. Sometimes we are sitting on the carpet with whiteboards too, and aren’t even at our tables yet! My kids have done really well with following the direction of leaving everything in their tray until they are told to touch it! It helps them stay organized so that they are able to focus.

Here’s what our tables looked like during Math! Can I just say that I am SO proud of my class!?! They have been great at participating, and absolutely love using their workmats and special counters. Math has really been more “exciting” for them getting to do things hands on like this.

This math lesson turned out to be a two day lesson! So at the end of Math, we put everything back into the table trays, including their worksheets, and they were ready to go the next day!!

Interested in doing table numbers in your classroom??? Click on the picture below to download the numbers 1-10. I love these bright shapes that my numbers are on from

I Teach What’s Your Superpower.

Are you ready for another FREEBIE!??

This week, I added new story elements posters to my whiteboard. We have been doing a unit on poetry, and there is a new poem each day. So, we talk about who the poet is, and what the title is. I write it on the whiteboard as we discuss.

If you want these posters for your own classroom, click on the picture below! This product is a forever freebie in my TPT store. Enjoy! 🙂

Finally, my kiddos have been LOVING using my Sight Word Emergent Readers. This week I had them try out my new zoo themed reader that features the sight word ‘are’

We color coded the letters first, so that they would be ready to glue these down on each page of the book independently.

I used my picture direction icons on the whiteboard to help the kids remember to cut and glue the words in their reader first, and then they could color it when they were done.