New Unit, New Bulletin Board

As I've said in the previous post, Catherine from The Brown-Bag Teacher has inspired me to put more energy into launching my reading units by revamping our library. I have a bulletin board located in that area, so really, it makes sense to switch it out with our units. Our next unit is a short one focused on non-fiction reading. This time however, we will be reading as if we are researchers, focusing on skills such as categorizing notes, answering essential questions, creating our own essential questions as well as other non-fiction skills such as compare/contrast, main idea and details, and word solving strategies. So here it is!

I felt like something was missing in the corner and I had pom-poms from my last bulletin board so I added them :) Couldn't let them go to waste!

 My shelves I made (I blogged about them here) are up and running! I talked to my custodian today to show him my craftiness and engineering skills. He then told me he had at least 16 of those shelves I was looking for from 3M downstairs... ahhhhhh! Oh well, these add a little color and I got to make them in different sizes, so that was good.

Check out the shelves up close:

Once students pick their country, they will place a flag on the map. I may also allow them to place a flag on the country they or their family is from in a different color. We'll see. We've already started reading about China in our read aloud, so I made one for me!

I also revamped the other wall space around the library. I had to move some charts around after adding the shelves. Here is our library expectation board, complete with rules, reading level codes and book shopping chart.
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Update: Here are some of their pins!! They LOVED doing this- they created their own flags and some were shocked to see how far away their country was (or even how close it is) to us.

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Bless their littler souls- trying to draw someone doing a "finger flip" through the bin. Their drawings may resemble something slightly different...

I also rearranged the posters on my lovely, beautifully colored mobile wall. (There was a bit of sarcasm in my voice there if you couldn't tell)

I also hung our review activity "Y" charts for the library and attached them to the cookie sheets I've had back there. My mom also got me some whisper phones (she always buys me a Christmas present for my classroom... this year- whisper phones and Smart Pals). I hung them on the wall so I can easily see that all 5 are returned each day.