Classroom Focus Board: Primary Peach Link Up

Hi everyone! I'm taking a few minutes away from my beach time to share an organizational tip with you and link up with my friends over at The Primary Peach. The Primary Peach is a teaching blog for elementary teachers in Georgia. If you teach in Georgia (or maybe even not) you should check this blog out! There are a lot of GREAT teachers that collaborate to bring you some of the best teaching tips.

I posted this picture over on Instagram back in February. I had a lot of people ask me about my board.

This board is at the center of my classroom. My students check this board when they come in each day. Here are some things that are included on it.

Today Is: of course, this is where the day's date is located. Students check here to see what the date is. .. simple enough!

Objectives: This is where I write the standards that we will be working on that day in kid-friendly "Today we will.." terms. In the past I had Reading, Writing, and Grammar labels that were already attached to the board, but we don't always do each one of those every day. I opted to write my labels instead. This gives me a little flexibility and allows my board to work WITH me... not against me.

Read Alouds: This is where I write what I am reading to each class (yes! I read to my 5th graders EVERY DAY!). Since my classes are very different (I'm going from 2 block to 4 blocks next year) they each get their own read aloud. Sometimes it will be the same (like with Hatchet)... but rarely.

Schedule: This is something that the students came up with. When I taught 4th grade math, I always had a list of things on the board that students needed to complete that day. When I moved to 5th grade ELA, I stopped doing that (I'm not sure why). One day while I was working on conferences, I wrote a list of things that needed to be done in the order in which they needed to be done. The students started asking me to do this each day. So, I decided to make our daily schedule a part of our board. The students really love this part because they don't have to ask the question, "what are we doing today, Mrs. Thornton." I'm not gonna lie.. I kind of love it, too!

I hope this is something that you can use in your classroom. You need to find what works for you. My board is fairly simple because it's easy to write up each morning. Next week, I'm going to share what I do to help me so my focus board can be written up in less than 5 minutes! That's right! Writing this board each morning takes less than 5 minutes! Want to know how? Come back next Sunday for another organizational tip :)

What is your organizational go-to? I hope you will join me and some of my closest friends over on the Primary Peach blog for Organizational Tips & Tools Linky Party.