A Bit of a FACElift!

Well, I thought I was closer to finishing my room than it turns out I really am!   Did you ever look at pictures taken in your home and start to notice all these different things that you don't notice in real life?  That's what happened as I took some pictures of my classroom for my "after" blog post.  I started to notice all these little things that I still need to take care of, so the after blog post is on hold for a bit.   The whole room reveal will be coming soon.  Gee, that makes it sound much more exciting than it really will be!

But!  In the meantime, I am going to share a picture of the new spot I put my FACE board.  I first showed you my FACE board in this post.  It's the board where I post a quick summary or reminder for my friends of the mini lesson we completed.  I still get a lot of questions about this board from blog land and even a few teachers in my own building.  Because of that, I thought I would share how it has evolved since the beginning of the year.  Here it is in its new spot:

In the process of moving the room around, the FACES board ended up on a closet next to my meeting table.   Oh, here's a sneak peak of that table for you.  The meeting table that I was worried was going to be way too yellow?  Yeah, it's really yellow!

But, I love it!  Now, back to FACES.  I still use the board in much the same way I noted in that earlier post.  After a mini lesson, we put up a one or two sentence summary of what we learned.  The board is now, as before, next to my meeting table and it comes in handy.  I often have my friends refer to it when we are working in our guided reading groups.  Here are some of the different cards we've put up so far:

FLUENCY

ACCURACY

COMPREHENSION

EXPAND VOCABULARY

-Voracious reading got cut off!

I think you can see some of our nonfiction lessons making their way on to the board.  I do still wonder about it sometimes.  I know that from a distance, the cards are hard to read.  If you look at the first picture above, you can see what I mean.  I wonder if I should maybe print up the cards in a bold font to make it easier to see.  On the other hand, I mostly use the board with my friends at our meeting table where it is all perfectly easy to read.  For this year, I've decided it is what it is.  I just don't have the time to put in to redo all the cards.  It's something to think about for next year.

Do you have a FACEs board?  How do you use yours?  If you don't, any ideas on how to improve on mine?  I'm always open to suggestions!

On a totally different topic. . .  If you blog, how do you come up with blog titles?  Sometimes I try to jazz it up, as in "A Bit of a FACElift." but most of the time I just post the topic of the blog as its title.  Hence the exciting title of my last post, "Nonfiction Text Structure."  So, is it a downer when blog titles are basic and boring?