About Reader's Workshop: Picture Post - Setting Up My Classroom

I know that I usually only write about Reader's Workshop, but I always love seeing how people set up their classrooms, so I thought I'd share some pictures of setting up mine. I've been unable to move anything myself, due to recent surgery, but I've been lucky enough to have wonderful helpers (cleaners, the registrar, teacher aides, the head of curriculum and the PE teacher as well as the son of the next door teacher all helped out). My husband and I are going in today to finish up the main stuff, and I'm book organising on Monday.

Caution - the rest of this post is picture heavy . . .

The Before Pictures

The front of my classroom. The room was painted over the holidays, so we had to put everything in the middle of the room. In my room, they then 'rearranged' some things, leaving it a little messy, as you'll see in the next two pictures. I also got brand new Smartboard (shiny!) If you look closely you can see my book baskets at the front of the room next to my laptop - I was going through them to pull out 'star' books for labelling

My new book shelves. The room I was in last year had built in book shelves, but this year I had to grab my own (as part of the great furniture grab - you should have seen the fight for the comfy chair). I ended up with eight bookshelves all together, all back to back with another book shelf.

Getting the heavy furniture into place. These bookshelves are going to serve as a place for my teacher resources, the games and construction materials, puppets, pencil cases, new books that aren't put out yet etc. The filing cabiet holds the kids files, and the plastic cabinet has stationary, highlighters and paper in it.

My computers and what will become the maths shelves. I am so lucky to have lots of power points and data points in this room - last year I was always scrambling for more. That desk is a proper computer desk, with power points for the computers built in.

The front of the room with my desk and pigeon holes nearly in place.

Onto the most important part of the room - the library! The books aren't in order yet, and I haven't completed the full tidy of them all, but this is what they look like in their baskets. You can also see Ida B. and Operation Yes there - both 2009 Star Books

This is the 'nook' between two bookshelves and next to a nice big window - should be a nice place to curl up and read. Also more books . . .

My poetry books. I'm going to ask the students to read at least one poetry book this year and I'm going to try to buy some more verse novels. At the bottom are folders of poetry that I made up last year.

My very messy and disorganised non-fiction section. I will get in and tidy that up today! Includes everything from Books on Flight to Books on Ballet . . .


So that's a small tour of my classroom. I'll take some more pictures when I'm in today, now that the room is looking more like a classroom :)

Read more about Reader's Workshop Here
Find some more pictures of my classroom here