A peek into my classroom

I am going into my 6th year of teaching 5th grade. I really like this age group. They are kids on the verge of becoming young adults. I can treat them like they are older and I expect a lot of responsibility from them, yet we can still have fun together. I love how at the beginning of the year, the girls stand heads taller than some of the boys, but by the end of the year, the boys start to catch up. Sometimes the students end up taller than me!

This is what the door to my classroom looks like. As you can see, I love incorporating my fire department stuff with my classroom. The door says "Fifth Grade is on Fire" and each child's name is writing on a flame. Then I outlined each one with gold glitter glue. (OK, so maybe I am a little creative).





The next two pictures I wanted to share even though September 11th is over for this year. Since I just started my blog, I didn't want to wait until next year to show it.

My class and I created a flag from red, white, and blue paper chains. (I got this idea from The Mailbox, a teacher's magazine.) It took two other people to help me get this out onto the wall. The kids wrote papers telling why they love America. Some of the writings are really interesting, because I have a very diverse classroom. One child is from Vietnam and about 5 are from Mexico. They all remember what it was like to live in another country and could really explain why life in America is better for their families.




This is a close up of the top of the display. The red cross is called a Maltese Cross and is a firefighter symbol. Click here to read more about this.
The numbers stand for the 343 firefighters who died on September 11th, simply doing the job they had to do. Some stations in New York lost almost all their members. The paper is just a small write up that I made to explain in simple terms what happened. To put this into perspective for all of you, my students were only 3 years old when this happened.



Hopefully my students learned something from this....and why we should never forget.....