Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation, and a pinch of creativity.

I HAVE TIME TO BLOG! :) Who knew I'd be so busy during the luxuriously long summer holidays that I have off?! After two beautiful weeks relaxing by a pool in Spain, I've been playing catch up with all my work and slowly ticking off the to-do list ready for the new term in September. The start of my NQT year is fast approaching now and I'm starting to feel the nerves!

It was finally time to get back into school today (I don't just laze around for the entire six weeks... well... almost) and I spent all day moving tables, laminating, making displays and generally organising my new classroom. Here is what it looked like when I arrived at 8:30 this morning...

It was quite an inspiring classroom when it was left for me but I had to take down everything that was blu-tacked for the massive Summer clean. After a lot of muscle work and hours of laminating and stapling it finally looked a little bit like this...

There were loads of ideas on Pinterest that I wanted to integrate into my first classroom so it was an exciting day having them all come together. You can check out my classroom ideas/inspiration board here and see if you can spot any of them in my classroom. 

I've grouped the children into tables and named them after British olympians and paralympians which ties into our 'Growing Together topic'. We are going to be looking into healthy living and ending the half term with a study of ancient greek olympics. There are lots of creative links that make absolute sense I promise!

I've switched the literacy and numeracy boards and backed them with lovely bright colours so that the classroom is nice and fresh even for the children that spent last year in there. My numeracy board still has some work left to do tomorrow but it has certainly brightened up that corner!

The 'UP' inspired display has been in progress since our moving up morning. I asked the children to write down what they wanted to achieve this year on a balloon so that their aspirations could metaphorically lift the house and we'd be 'growing together'. See what I did there? ;) The bookcase and desk area is sooooo much better and more accessible now too. I want to create a really attractive reading environment/chill out zone so that the children will be more encouraged to use the space. The post box is a nice touch from the old classroom, I will be using it for children to write down any problems or feelings that they might not like to talk about.

Now for the super geeky, keen teacher bit. I have been sooooo picky about the organisation of the classroom. To be honest I think it was made worse by the two weeks cover I did back in July because I had to teach according to someone else's rules until Summer. I literally couldn't wait to replace the visual timetable, figure out a way around the CONSTANT pencil sharpening and move the desk so things didn't fall off the back.

Visual Timetable - I like my timetable to have a simple image and phrase so that it doesn't take up loads of room on the board. These editable square images from twinkl are really lovely and completely free! They have a huge range of resources and I definitely recommend checking them out. I used their mini-beast borders during placement and the children loved them.

Pencil Hospital - I really hope this works, I can't cope with children spending more than five minutes sharpening their pencil to a perfect point. All children will have their own pencil and when it snaps, they can replace it with a pencil from the 'ready to work pot' and leave their pencil in the 'pencil hospital' pot. Then I can have monitors to use the 'pencil doctors' (sharpeners) to fix all the poorly pencils. Genius. Just genius.

Caught you being awesome! - For a bit of positive behaviour reinforcement, I will be giving away raffle tickets to children who are caught doing something awesome in my classroom. It could be for effort, manners, being a good friend or whatever really. They write their name on a ticket and pop it in the treasure chest at the end of the lesson. At the end of the week I will choose two names from the chest and they get a little prize from the box. Children should soon realise that the more times their name is in, the more chance they have. Probability objective ticked? :P

Lollypop sticks - I'm sure all my NQT friends will be using this idea already. Write the names of your class on lollypop sticks. Obviously I had to recruit Ryan to do mine because of my weird wet wood phobia. Theeen you have a lucky dip of names when you want a 'no hands up' class discussion.

Even though I am totally knackered, I am excited to get back into school and finish sorting out the rest of my classroom tomorrow! :) September NQTs... please let me know if you come accross any other ideas. I will be intently following my Pinterest feed in the meantime!