As many of you begin prepping your rooms for a new year, a few of my blogging friends decided to join together to share our favorite area of our classroom with you! I’m sure it comes as no surprise that my favorite is our guided reading area. I especially love all of the storage and having my guided reading supplies right at my fingertips. My favorite part of our guided reading / small group table are the dry erase Wall Pops!

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Let’s take a closer look at this area, as I break down all the details!

Guided Reading Area

The Table

This is by far the area of my classroom that receives the most questions… mostly because of the shape and size of my table. To be honest, it was actually an old hexagon shaped table that I believe was used as a computer station. Our maintenance crew cut the table in half and added some rubber edging along the inside edge. It really is the perfect size for my classroom, and it easily fits six seat crates.

The Seat Crates

I made these seat crates about four years ago as a way to add extra storage options in my particularly small space. Since I already had the black file crates and plywood, my only expense was the seat foam and fabric. These crates work well as an alternative seating option for my students, and are low enough to slide under the table. I bet you are probably wondering what I keep inside them… Four of them hold all of my book sets on CD, while the other two house our students’ goal and data folders.

The Storage Bins

I also receive a lot of questions about what I store inside all of the bins behind my guided reading table. The big bins along the top of the shelf hold all of the materials for each day’s lessons, as well as extra copies for morning work, emergent readers and center activities. The big, pink tubs along the bottom hold all of my mentor texts and themed read alouds. As an aside, I also have a large classroom library for my students.

Now, back to bins on these shelves!

I keep all of my teacher manuals, data binder, and larger guided reading supplies, such as touch lights, Slinkys, Playdoh, etc. in the lime green bins. Each of the drawers contain alphabet, rhyming and segmenting activities and other guided reading supplies, as well as each group’s guided reading books. Our color coded phoneme segmentation and blending cards also fit easily inside.

I do believe I will be eliminating two of the lime green tubs this year, and adding additional drawers for our guided math materials.  You can read a more detailed post about what’s inside the guided reading drawers here.

The Wall Pops

One of my favorite parts of my guided reading area are the dry erase Wall Pops that I purchased from Amazon. I just added these last year, and it was so nice not having to pass out student dry erase boards each time we met. I simply handed the kiddos a marker, and we were all set for practicing letter formation, identifying beginning sounds, segmenting words, and so much more!  The Wall Pops come three to a pack and are peel and stick. They were very easy to adhere to the table, and didn’t leave any sticky residue on the table at the end of the year. Plus, they added a nice “pop” of color to my small group area!

Here are a few ways I used the Wall Pops to practice and reinforce skills:

1.  Proper Number Formation

2.  Number Sense

3.  Counting Backwards

4.  Dice Addition

5.  Turn Around Facts

6.  Fact Families

7.  Proper Letter Formation

8.  Properly Writing Names

9.  Identifying Beginning Sounds

10. Segmenting Words

11. Word Families

12. Segmenting Words and Recording Sounds

DON’T FORGET IT…PIN IT!

Read more about how I organize my guided reading supplies here.