Open House

**Visit The Colorful Apple for an UPDATED version of this post!**

Hi all!  I've been MIA for quite some time now...it must be back to school time!  It was a bit of a challenging back to school this year, for a variety of reasons.  But my class was wonderful yesterday so I think we are going to have a great year!

Thursday night was Open House, so I wanted to share some  a lot of  pictures!  I borrowed a LOT of these ideas from fellow bloggers and Pinterest.  I will share where I got my inspiration from, although it might not be the original source.

Welcome to Open House!

This is the entrance to my room on Open House night.

The banner came from The School Supply Addict for free!  My resource teacher told me I should keep it up all year, what do you think?

This was out in the hallway:

The students created flowers were all of their favorite things in them.  I created the poster with Tagxedo.  Our school mascot is the SuperStar and it has all the kids names in it!

We created a Who Am I board:

I got this bulletin board idea from Surfing Through Second.

The students wrote a few clues about themselves and then drew a picture:

Underneath the flap, I pasted a picture of the student holding their name:

{another teacher told me the pictures looked like mug shots - oops!}

The kids had the best time making their parents guess which one was theirs.

Check out my information table!

My magnets with contact information from VistaPrint were a big hit!

Open House is always kind of rushed and parents are coming and going all night, so I don't really have an opportunity to make a presentation so I put all my information into a brochure for parents to take:

The apples in the top left of the table came from:

                                                                        Source: mrsterhune.blogspot.com via Sara on Pinterest

Here is my version:

The bookmarks idea came from:

                                                              Source: aplacecalledkindergarten.blogspot.com via Nancy on Pinterest

Here are mine:

Clipart by Scrappin Doodles

I had the students write letters to their parents to leave on their desks:

This came from The Teacher Wife and it was also free!  I was so glad that I had it, because my students desperately needed the prompts this year.  My original idea was just to write a letter from scratch but that wasn't going to happen!

I thought about leaving a paper for parents to write back to their child, but most students come with their parents so I decided it wasn't worth it.

Here are some classroom pictures that aren't related to Open House, but I wanted to share!

I made some new bathroom passes and the kids love them!

Clipart by Scrappin Doodles

Here is the original pin:

                                                                 Source: 3rd-grade-thoughts.blogspot.com via Sara on Pinterest

I also created a classroom timeline to put on our {very plain} closet doors:

Clipart by Scrappin Doodles

My goal is take at least a few pictures each month and hang them up on our wall.  I got this cool idea from Bright Concepts 4 Teachers.

And, lastly, the sweet chair one of my friends made for me!

She bought the chair from a consignment shop and painted it for me!  I put it right next to the table she made for me last year.  My kids {and principal} love it!  One kid told me it looked like Play-Dough.  Um, okay!

**UPDATE**
I've created an Open House packet for your classroom!  Open House is a Hoot is my owl-themed packet!  Click on the pictures to check it out!