Wonderful Ideas for Teaching

So, my cooperating teacher is a real talker and so I stay at the school for a good 2 hours after it gets out. It's ok, though, because I am learning a lot of new things. We start talking about things and one thing turns into the next and soon we've talked about a lot of things. For instance, today she wanted to show me a program that I could use for their spelling and such and then she told me how she had lost her copy of the program she bought so she was using the schools and I expressed a desire to see how much it would cost becuase it would be really useful. So we got on the internet and looked it up and...it costed way to much! You could probably find it cheaper somewhere else but it got bought by Mcgraw company and is now way more expensive than when she bought it. Well, we then started talking about room setups and she showed me this really cool website of a teacher who has TONS of ideas. It's amazing and looks way fun! This is it in case you are interested in looking at it....the few people who are teachers..if any..that look at this..anyways, here it is-http://hill.troy.k12.mi.us/staff/bnewingham/myweb3/index.htm- We had a great time looking at that. Get this, every year she has a new theme and she decorates her room accordingly, has activities all throughout the year for it, takes pictures of the students on the first day and makes introductory things for it (for example, for the TEAM theme she took their pics and then made a type of baseball card out of it with a cool background and everything and then on back it was a thing telling all about them so everyone could get to know them). Anyways, it's just amazing. One thing I envy is that she has a HUGE classroom and so she can do tons of stuff for it. All of the classrooms that I've been in have been so small that there's barely room to read anywhere or even do centers- sometimes there's only room for desks! So much more learning could go on if they'd make classrooms bigger so the students have more chances to learn independently and feel comfortable. Well, if you have time you should look at the site..if you want. :)