Spreading Joy...One Giggle At A Time!: Worry Jar

Well, we are officially into our second week of the new school year and my new firsties have not disappointed me! I am in love with them already!!!! This years bunch is a hard working group of kind-hearted friends. Let me show you what the world looks like from our point of view every day....

Welcome to Room 120!

We are so amazingly lucky aren't we??? Our building is only three years old, so all the furnishing are still new. We have worked very hard to impress upon the students the importance of keeping everything nice, and to preserve the "newness" of the classrooms, we are not allowed to hang anything on the walls or tape anything down on the tables or desks. (Anything you see hanging in the pictures is suspended from the ceiling with paper clips and fishing line.)

This is the view from outside our classroom door. We each have a bulletin board outside our doorway where we can put our goals or units of study for the month.

When my firsties come in each morning they check in for lunch and their traveling home plans. (Our school district does not have busing, so the dismissal options can tend to get a bit confusing if you don't have a set plan in place.) Both these products are in my TPT store. (Click on links below)

Classroom Lunch Count Diplay Dismissal Signs

This is my Word Study board where current vocab and spelling words will be displayed, and our DONE and NOT DONE baskets. (Very important to keeping students organized and accountable).

Hanging on the door is something that plays a very important role in MY sanity every day! This is where students "check out" when they leave the classroom to go somewhere else in the building. They still need my permission to leave the room, but with 25 little firsties, all with their own schedules to follow each day, there are times in the day when it is easy to lose track of where everyone has gone!

I LOVE MY WORD WALL!!! We do not have many bulletin boards in our rooms, so I tried using only half of this board as my word wall last year, but I really wasn't happy with the results. It seems to me that it defeats the purpose of having a word wall that you teach your students to use if then you end up squishing all the words together in a way that is cluttered and unorganized.

My favorite place in my room????? THE LIBRARY OF COURSE!!! (Especially now that I redid all my labels this year with the help of my friend Maribel over at Learning In Wonderland!)

We keep our choice time toys in the bins, and in the cart we keep our crayons, glue sticks, scissors, markers, etc. By the way, do you seperate your crayons by color? BEST THING I EVER DID!!! No more searching FOREVER for the crayon they need... now they just pull out that color drawer, grab one and go!

The Worry Jar! If you haven't already read my previous post about this CLASSROOM MUST please make sure to read it!

These are our pet frogs Phelps and Lochte! We love them! (I used to be a die-hard hermit crab owner, but a friend turned me on to these guys and I gotta say.... much less maintenance!) I do miss my crabbies though...just might need to bring them back around! Our Class Read Aloud Response Journal is where we record our Read Alouds each day and journal about them. Sometimes we journal as a class and sometimes we journal individually.

Our Social Story Basket is the most used basket in our library, so I keep it up on top of the bookshelves for easy access. You can read about how I use social stories in my classroom in an early post.

These are Our Class Birthday Goodies! You can find them in my Birthday Palooza Bundle.Each child receives a birthday balloon on a silly straw, a birthday watch, a birthday pencil and poem, a birthday card, and a birthday necklace. We then interview the birthday child and they get their own pages in our Birthday Book (some done at school, and some done at home with their family.) In the picture below you can see where I put the birthday pictures above the board. I take pictures of the students who have birthdays in each month and put their pictures up with their months.

Above my board I have some of my favorite inspirational quotes. I refer to them often with my students throughout the year. I have a SmartBoard, so I don't use this board a whole lot. That is why I am able to use it for other things. On it I keep track of No Name papers, table points, the Flow of the Day, and Voice Level. In the buckets is where I keep my Brain Stretch Set...Joke of the Day, Question of the Day, and Fact of the Day.

My little corner of all this happiness!

Our Class Expectations, our Behavior Clip Chart, and Our Class Pledge...

Warm Fuzzies!!! Our classroom runs on these! (This idea originally came from Mel D. at Seusstastic. I have just tweeked it to fit the needs of my students.) They earn fuzzies for various good, great, and outstanding behaviors throughout the day and then can trade them in for coupons to be used on WARM FUZZY FRIDAY!!!

This is where we keep our reading and writing folders...in our spinners. ONE OF MY FAVORITE CLASSROOM PURCHASES!!! I got these from a teacher supply store that was going out of business. $20.00 each friends! The mailboxes are shoe organizers that I stacked together and painted.

I hope you enjoyed touring our little corner of the world! Have a great week!

The Worry Jar is a great classroom technique to help ease the anxiety and worries of school aged kids! Find out how giving worries up to the worry jar relieves stress, anxiety and nervousness for students of all ages!

As Back To School time approaches, there isn't a teacher out there that won't tell you HORROR STORIES about the Back To School nightmares he or she is having. (These nightmares usually involve students literally climbing walls; rooms with no supplies, walls, or humans, but lots of goats and chickens; and my favorite, the one where the bell rings and you know the students have been in there for a good 20 minutes, but the hallway just keeps getting longer and longer and you just can't get to the room!) But as unnerving as these "wake you up in a cold sweat" terrors can be for us teachers, we know in our hearts that everything is going to be fine when we go back to school, and goats and chickens would never pass the dress code policy anyway.....

But....

Try Being A Kid Today! The things kids have on their plates to worry about today far surpass what we EVER had to worry about as kids! (Take this picture for instance...these girls had no idea their teacher would be asking them to do MANUAL LABOR when they got to school and clean the guts out of a pumpkin!!! As you can tell by the first picture, this firstie was not letting this project go by without me knowing how she felt about being asked to do this!) But seriously....
I teach in a district where many of my students come to school with very heavy burdens to carry. On top of the day to day kid stuff of sibling rivalry, cellphones, video games, snapchat, and the likes, in our district the poverty level is very high as is unemployment. Many of our students realize the trickle-down effects of those situations, and come to school hungry, tired, and still in the clothes from the day before. With class sizes as large as 30 and sometimes more, as much as I would love to be able to do it, it is very difficult to address all the worries and fears that the students carry in with them each morning. (We begin each day with Morning Meeting, but not all worries and fears are meant to be shared publicly.)
Now I know that when I have a worry or a concern about something at the forefront of my mind, it doesn't really matter WHAT is being said/taught/introduced by the person standing in the front of the room...I am going to keep worrying about my worry! So you can bet that little kids are going to do the same thing! Until you help them take care of that worry, it won't matter if you teach the BEST LESSON IN THE WORLD...they aren't going to get one word of it!!!
That is why I started something in my classroom called...

THE WORRY JAR!

The Worry Jar is one of my FAVORITE things in my classroom! I explained to the children that I know how they feel when they come to school with a worry in their heart or head that they just can't stop thinking about, because it happens to me too! So I made this jar for them to put their worries in! The pages to put their worries on look like this...

I allow them to go to the jar at any time during the day if they are feeling like they need to put a worry in the jar. (Even if it is during a lesson, I allow them to get the paper started and then if I need to, I ask them to wait to finish the worry page, but that usually doesn't happen.) I tell them that putting their name on the worries is optional and that I do empty the jar each night. I keep an eye on who uses the jar and if they look particularly upset about something I check in with them immediately or check the jar early. Most of the time though, just putting their worry down on paper is enough for them to begin to feel better!
These are some of the worries that I have found in the jar....