Welcome to Grade 4K

I've been promising some photos of my classroom, so here they are, finally!

To give you a little context, I'll start with a photo of the main entrance/exit on the corner, with our school signage, as well as photo of the buildings. This gate is only open for the beginning and end of day. At all other times, access is via the side gate between the two buildings in the second photo.

My classroom is on the 4th floor of the big yellow building. Most of our classrooms, as well as our library are in this building. The ground floor is open, and this is where staff motos are parked and the children play at recess and lunch times. No sports field or oval here. The domed roof in front is our basketball court / PE area.The sides are fenced all around to prevent balls escaping!

The stars on the door are all different, just like the children's names that are on them.

Come on in!

Everyone has a number. The goal is to keep a green card all day. To do this, students need to keep the rules. Generally they do fairly well. Consequences are not fun if you get to orange or red cards.

Looking for a good word to describe something a classmate has done well. Look no further than the positive words posting. These were made by my students last year.

Like most classrooms, things can get a little noisy at times, so now we have the "Noise-o-meter".
Loud is only permitted on special occasions. (Soft Voice now has an extra title - Partner Voice).

This is the Language Arts poster corner, with some great posters on the parts of speech, thanks to one of the previous 4th grade teachers, and 6-traits of writing, as well as the Noise-o-meter.
Developing ways of using the 6 traits is coming up very soon in our Language Arts program.
The desk in the corner belongs to my very capable assistant, Mr Dy.

And here's my messy corner. I can tell I took this photo on a swimming day from the extra bags in the corner. Notice the umbrella hanging from the window bars. I don't go to school without it at the moment, as the rainy season is well and truly in progress.

Backing onto my desk is the classroom library. This is what's left on the shelves after each child has two or three books on loan. They have one in their "boxes" to read in the classroom, one in their homework folder for home reading, and at the moment they have a third book for writing a book report.

Here are as many of my treasures as I could get in to the photo. We start the day sitting on the mats, taking attendance, listening to a story, or doing some other whole class activity. They may not look very happy, but they are. For some reason they don't like smiling for photos as a rule. Still haven't worked that one out.

And here are a couple of the boys reading those books for their book reports.

Wondering where the children keep their books and belongings? As you can see, we don't have individual desks, so instead each child has a "box" in the shelves along the wall just inside the door. These boxes are open, so there's some necessity for tidiness. It's a bit hard to hide a messy box than to hide a messy desk. Mostly they do fairly well.

Thank you for taking time to visit Grade 4K. I hope you enjoyed your visit and come back sometime soon.