Ahoy There Matey! A Pirate Themed Classroom

Summer is here!  Time to sleep in, go to the pool, and spend time with the kiddos.  For me, it's also time to reflect on the past school year and spend some time thinking about what I want next year to look like.  Next year brings some exciting changes for me.  I will have a new second grade partner, who has some really great ideas.  The change has brought out the creativity in me and has renewed my enthusiasm for teaching. 

Since habitats is a huge part of our science curriculum, we decided to focus on the ocean theme as our decor for our room.  While my partner will be decorating her room in blues, greens, and aquamarines, I decided to go a different route and decorate my room in reds, blacks, and browns...the colors of PIRATES!

Considering my room is painted off white and bright blue, I may have my work cut out for me.  But, I'm sure I can make it work, even if I have to do some painting myself!  There are tons of freebies out there for your classroom.  I found a lot of resources on teacherspayteachers.com.  Since they were brightly colored games and centers, I printed them out at school and laminated them while I was there for training the past 2 weeks. 

So far I've created 2 things for my room.  One is a behavior chart, which you can get for free HERE, done in Microsoft Word so you can customize it the way you want.  Above is a picture of part of it.  It's the kind of chart where I will put my students names on clothespins and they will move their clothespin down for each offense. I'm hoping everyone will stay on purple most of the year!

Secondly I created this cute argyle wreath to hang on my door.  It was super easy and I was done in about 30 minutes.  I bought a wreath form, some yarn, ribbon, a flower, and some felt.  I wrapped the wreath form in yarn and hot glued it down.  Then I cut out and glued diamonds around the wreath. Next I took the white yarn and criss crossed it over the diamonds.  I glued on the flower.  I made cute little red felt flowers and glued those on too.  Those area easy to make and the tutorial can be found HERE. Finally I tied a ribbon around it and hung it on my door.

 



August 2:  I was up at 3 in the morning, so I got on Pinterest (bad idea if you want to get back to sleep!) and got a ton of ideas for my classroom.  I found this freebie from Autumn Proctor-Zaminski. These are totally cute chevron stars in all kinds of colors.  I decided to use the black stars to update my word wall.  I put the minutes of the clock on the red stars.  I'm going to tape those around my clock to help my kiddos tell time.  If you want a copy for yourself, you can get if for free at my tpt store by clicking HERE.

That's all I've done so far.  I'm going into my classroom today, even though I vowed I wouldn't for another 2 weeks:) With so many ideas and thoughts in my head I just can't stay away!

I plan on creating a bulletin board for outside my room, as well as more decor and bulletin boards in my classroom.  I'll keep you posted on my next projects!