Class and lesson helpers

I am almost finished rearranging our tiny classroom and I am pleased with our space. I had to reorganize to maximize the available space, so I put various little things in rolling carts that have drawers:



These are handy for dinosaurs, puzzles, Play-doh and art supplies. One drawer stores our worksheets for the week and another has pencils and extra writing utensils. It seems that no matter how many pencils I purchase, they are hard to find when we need them.



This is one of the places that we use with our felt stories/calendar felts. I need to add Velcro to the backs of the flashcards that you see with the Islamic months on them. We found these at a used classroom furniture sale last summer, along with our white board. The seller was literally down the street from us on the side of the road. We almost did not see him. He delivered everything and gave us a really nice price. The other board has some felt pieces on it. I need to cut them a bit and shape the bottom piece like grass. Felt is nice because it is really inexpensive; I found these at Walmart.



So far, my daughter is responding well to the phonics program - I am still waiting for a piece of the math curriculum. We also did a session about stranger danger - which included advice about speaking to people who are Muslim that you do not know. I explained that returning salaams to others is fine but never go home with/accept gifts/food/rides from someone you don't know, even if that person appears to be Muslim. Always refuse. I went here for a lesson plan that I loosely used as a guide. Now, we will focus on reciting and writing our address and telephone number, InshaALLAH.

One thing I am pleased with is the teacher's manual that I recently received for our science lessons



This book is nice because it has the lesson plan drawn up for you!



This saves me a lot of time. I found out about this text through Follett Educational Services. They sell used text books and they deliver to Canada and abroad. I didn't actually purchase from them because the books were not available at the time but their site is invaluable because it lists the accompanying texts for whatever book you need. It also gives the ISBN so I used that information to get the science texts for $5 U.S. from another seller.