Rainbow Shelves!!

As you may or may not know, my theme this year is rainbow colors. I'm super pumped! I've never done a theme before. (I've never spent two consecutive years teaching even in the same state! My advice to any first year teachers, don't do a theme. You'll worry about it more than other important things. Your first year is about survival. Just make it to the end alive!!) I don't have a reason behind this theme other than I've always loved the sequence of the colors, it's simple, it's aesthetically pleasing, and with all the basic colors of the rainbow supplied by the school in butcher and construction paper, I decided to get it going.

Today's post is a combination of three ideas initially found on Pinterest. First I saw this idea two years ago:

It's from Dandelions and Dragonflies' blog. She has amazing ideas! I love her use of colors, and I love how she used bookshelves to separate and organize table groups. So starting in January this year, I bought five bookshelves, one each month, from Wal Mart. The cheapo kind that only cost about $17.

Then, while on a rare perusal on Pinterest <cough, cough>, I found this idea from Little Lovely Leaders:

She does a rainbow theme and bookshelves, but what caught my eye were the paper trays on each set of shelves. She says she puts the day's papers into the baskets so when it's time to get paper x out for science or math or whatever, they are already at each group. No more wasting time passing out papers! I have to admit, I'm really excited about that!

Then I saw these beauties:

I don't know where they originally came from, so if you know, please tell me so I can give that person credit! Aren't they lovely? 

So, combine all the ideas above and what do you get? 

Yay! I only want five table groups. The school didn't have any purple butcher paper, but I decided purple would be the teacher's color. I'll explain how I made these.

The shelves from Wal Mart are only backed with poster board paper, and only one side is black. I stapled the group color onto the side that would be touching the shelves. I lined up and stapled one side at a time cutting off extra as I went along.

Here's the backing of the first one all finished. It looks orange in the picture, but it's red. It's also very ripply. I don't do perfect, remember?

Then I assembled the shelves.

I nailed the back on and voila!

View from the back. Now it will look more uniform and not have that nasty off-white color on the back.

After I completed the first book shelf, I laid everything else out mass production style and went to town!

Here's another picture. Pay no attention to the binder clip at the bottom of the yellow one. The cheap particle board broke, so I put some Gorilla Glue on the pieces and the binder clip is holding them together until they are dry. And they last one is blue not black. I tried to get a better shot. Oh well!

Yay! The rainbow theme is coming together. I was exhausted today, so this is basically all I accomplished. I was able to clean out my math files, though, so that was good. I hope to get back into the room on Friday for more work! Thanks for reading, and have a great day. :)