My New Room in Pictures

I moved into the new room yesterday! I took some before pics so you can see how it all started out:

 This is the view from the door. The room looks huge, doesn't it?

If you turn the other way at the door you see the back wall with another white board.

Here's the cubby wall - I've got a ton of storage now!

All of the furniture you see in the pictures belonged to the other 1st grade teacher who moved. Most of it I'm getting rid of. I had to bring all of my tables, chairs and assorted furniture from my old room down to this room. Luckily my daughter came along to help! Here's the loooong hallway we had to haul everything down:

If you look carefully you can see a little brown blob on the left hand side of the hallway - that's where my old room was, so it was quite a trek to bring all of my furniture and boxes to the new room!

I had to help with enrollment too, so I only managed to move everything to my room before I had to stop. Here's what I accomplished:

I have a lot of work left to do!

Once I got home last night I did some customization work for some of my center signs - if you were thinking of buying a set but need a center title changed or a center added, please let me know! I can usually get the customizations done within a night or two at this point. 

Then I made colored rice! This was actually the first time I made it and I was inspired by Greg over at Smedley's Smorgasboard of Kindergarten who made some last Friday night (I mean, if a guy can do it, it can't be that hard right?! lol just teasing Greg!)  I had promised my kids they could help me, so when I discovered we were out of food coloring I had to make some adaptations. The kids love using food coloring in their baths, so I will have to start purchasing one set for the kitchen and one set for the bathroom!

I ended up using vinegar rather than rubbing alcohol, because we were out of that too - can you tell I planned this project really well?! We also used some Kool-Aid packets to take the place of the food coloring. I think the colors came out wonderful!

It did smell a little funky because of the vinegar, but I solved that problem by adding 1/4 teaspoon of maple extract. I tried vanilla extract first but it didn't have a strong enough scent to cover up the vinegar completely. The maple extract is awesome, all I could think of was making pancakes and it didn't affect the color at all! I am buying food coloring today so I can make more colors tonight - I want to have a rainbow of colors for different activities we will be doing during the first few weeks!

Next up I recovered some of my crate seats from last year. Last year my theme was less cohesive, so I went with a variety of patterns/colors. This year I'm trying to stick with a very calming blue/green/brown color scheme, so I just took my old crate seat tops and recovered them! I love the fabric and I have a coordinating pattern to cover the little table in my reading area.

Here's my before:

Then I flippped the seat tops over and used a staple gun to recover them right over the old fabric (I can't decide if that makes me lazy or just smart?):

And here's how they look now - I think they'll look great once I get them into my room with all of the other things!

All right, I'm off to school to tackle that room some more! Before I go, could I ask you to please click on this little button and vote for me? There are only two more days to vote and I am no where near the top.  I am wondering if we could pull off a last minute voting surge that could propel me into the top 25? Let's see!