Focus Board.. YAY!

Hi guys!  I'm so impressed that I'm going to have more than one post this week... say what??  I wanted to share my new focus board with you.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm pretty happy with it.  I have moved all of my things into one central location at the front of the room.  Here's what it looks like.

It may be difficult to see, but the top left are our "We Can" statements.  In the past, my district required us to post "I Can" statements with the standard.  I have decided that I like "We" because it instills a sense of community in the classroom.  I *just* realized that I forgot my subject area labels for this block. Oh well, guess I'll fix that tomorrow.

In the bottom left, I have our EQs for each subject I teach.  These are directly related to the standard or "We Can" statement that we are focusing on for each day.  To the right of that you will see our weekly skills area.  Again, this is correlated to both the EQs and the "We Can" statements.  I love that the students have one place on Monday where they can come and check what we are studying that week.

Above it are our 'no excuse' words.  These are words that our district has identified for 5th grade students to know how to spell.  They should have "no excuse" for not knowing them.  I have 20 each week and then we add them to our word wall.  I highly encourage the use of our word wall during writing.

In the {ugly} green pocket chart are our prefix, suffix, and root words.  I'll go into that tomorrow :)  They are color-coded to match what we are doing in class.

 Here's what that area of my board looked like at the beginning of the year... blah!  I rarely used it even though I knew I should.  To be honest, I don't even think the students looked at it much.

You may remember how *unhappy* I was about this focus wall.  This is where it use to be.  Now, I have both places (and purposes) combined into one!

I just love my new focus wall.  I was so excited to talk to the students about it today!