Math Games Library

I love using math games. The kids love them and they're good practice for fact fluency. However, I wanted to have a bunch of different operations, levels of challenge, group vs. individual, etc. available whenever I needed them. I also wanted something kids could take home if they wanted to continue practicing because, let's be honest, Xtramath is a bit dull.

Therefore, the math games library was born! I pulled games from TpT, created some of my own, invested in lots of bins, bags, containers, clothespins, game pieces and colored paper. After plenty of printing, cutting, bagging, labeling etc., it's ready to go. Each game has a clothespin attached, and students "sign out" the game by placing the clothespin on their name on a chart on the shelf. That way we can keep track of who has what. We'll see how it goes!

UPDATE: The kids love the games! The U-Know games are the most popular by far, whether it is for in-class play on Fridays or to sign out and take home. The clothespins are working fairly well, but we did lose a game that just has a random clothespin in the bottom of the basket. Ahh, well.

Lumos Readability Report

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DIY projects

DIY Project #1:

I was cleaning out some old kindergarten supplies and came across the purple drawer container which used to house all of my alphabet stamps. I thought it could be a cute desk holder for all of those knick-knacks that get cluttered around, so I brought it home for a little TLC. I peeled off all the old ABC stickers and gave it a good cleaning, printed out some new labels and taped them on (I would have put them on the inside, but the label goo didn't come off), and then painted the outside with an acrylic paint. Total cost: $1.87. Not bad!

DIY Project #2:

After finishing the bin makeover, I was still feeling crafty. One of my biggest frustrations is the piles of paper on my teacher table. A pile to grade, a pile to file, and a pile to pass back. If only there were some better way to organize it all! A quick trip to the store for the container and 4 sheets of scrapbook paper, a few minutes of cutting and modge podging, and a hunt through my current hanging folders in other spots to find 4 that match the color scheme, and voila... A new organizer for my table! Total cost: under $8.

Maybe this will finally be the year that my table looks organized? 

NaNoWriMo Update

I have posted before about taking on the NaNoWriMo challenge with my students. For the last two years, I have spent the month of November plugging away at a novel with a goal of 30,000 words. They wrote and published their own books and told me that I should do the same with my two novels. So I figured, why not? It was many hours of proofreading, formatting, researching information about self-publishing, more proofreading, and more formatting, but I think it was all worth it in the end. The proof of the second book is already on its way, and with any luck I'll have both done before the school year starts.

The best part? For at least this year, I'll have a book that none of the kids have read. I won't have to hear, "Oooh, I know what happens!" and it'll be a great literature discussion! Here is Book 1!

When You Enter...

I came to the sudden realization the other day that except for the little welcome bird I made, my doors were quite empty!  Worse yet, I have two doors to my classroom.  So, a quick Pinterest search, a hunt for fonts, a little scrapbook paper... and voila!  It's nothing too fancy, but I like that it gives credence to so many different roles that students may take on within the course of a day in my classroom.

DIY Projects

Moving to a new grade level for the second year in a row, I didn't quite know where to start again this summer.  I brought home curriculum and textbooks, downloaded all of the common core standards, started looking at what went wrong last year that needed to be improved... but most importantly, since I will have some of the same kids that I had last year, I needed a new classroom theme!  And that meant that the cute DIY projects took precedence over everything else for a while!

My room was repainted, and while the color is lighter than it was before, it's still quite yellow.  Pair that with wooden cubbies, wood trim, a wooden desk, wood doors... it was a little overwhelming and needed some contrast and color!  I am a huge fan of the white shelves and cart that I painted last year, with all of my clear and white bins, so that helped.  I decided to get rid of the lime green bulletin boards and trade it for turquoise, and then I found the cute, white, Boho Birds borders to tie it all together.

After a few trips to the craft stores, I had tulle, scrapbooking paper, a cute wooden bird cutout (on clearance for a dollar), a few small wood birds, small wood rectangles, small clothespins, glitter glue, glue dots, and probably a few other things.

The large bird is decoration for the classroom door, the medium birds will be locker tags, and the small birds and white rectangles will be the dismissal board.

Tulle and scrapbook paper turned into cute little nested birds to number the tables.

Leftover scrapbook paper turned into a pennant to hang above the white board and all the little critters my kids have given me over the years (two sided means it's even pretty in from the hallway!)

Here is the bird on the door with my homemade "curtains" (scrapbook cardstock punched into circles and sewn together on the sewing machine), and my jobs board with the glittered clothespins to hold the name cards.  The 5 jobs at the top will be revealed a few weeks into school, and students will need to apply for those 'Specialists' jobs.

Now that everything is hung up, I guess I better dig back into the planning!

Inspirational Posters

The mix of emotions in switching grade levels can be overwhelming. Excitement at the prospect of something new, and in this case getting to work with a great group of kids for the second year in a row, yet apprehension about a brand new curriculum.  In my case, it's the second year in a row for this range of emotions and without being able to get into my new room to start organizing things physically, all I can do is sit and plan things out in my head or on paper.  And boy do I have notes and new projects started everywhere! I'm happy to finally be finishing a thing or two on my to-do list!

The one thing I do know is that my new classroom is getting a fresh coat of paint, and it's a bright yellow (quite a change from the calming blue I had last year).  I wanted to keep the same clean, organized look that I had last year, but I needed to switch up the color scheme a bit from the bright lime and turquoise I had.  Perhaps a set of posters with little inspirational sayings would be nice if they were in white frames?  But wouldn't that get expensive?  Lucky for me, I was able to find 4-packs of black document frames at the Christmas Tree Shop for $4.99... who can pass up 8 frames for $10? A few coats of white paint and, voila!  That left finding just the right posters to match and fit into my frames, and they seemed to be non-existent, so I decided to create them myself.

These are 6 out of the 8 posters, ready to be hung.  If you are interested in your own copy of the posters, you can find them on my TpT store, or my Teacher's Notebook store.  Enjoy!

Owls

Found the idea for these owls on Pinterest (where else?) so I made one for each table.  I found the paper lanterns at the Christmas Tree Shop for 2/$1.00, and they had colors that matched with my theme, so that was the perfect price.  A little scrapbooking paper for the wings, some construction paper for the rest of the details, a little glue, and voila! I put a small clothespin hanging from each one so that I can label the tables and change the labels.  I might start the year with numbers, but I'd like to name the tables something like "Fantastic", "Super", "Terrific", etc.  Might be a good time to do that when we talk about synonyms and using more interesting words in our writing! 

 

I'm so glad I got the entire number line and all of the owls hung today.  Hopefully I won't need to drag the ladder out again!

Crate Seating

So I had seen the cute crate seating that others were posting on Pinterest, and wanted to make some for my classroom.  Lucky for me, my friend who teaches second grade wanted to make them too, so we were off on a hunt for the cheapest, yet most durable supplies we could find.  Here is what we used:

Crates - I had a bunch of milk crates at school which I was planning to use, but unfortunately they were actual milk crates and didn't have the lip inside for the seat to sit on.  So, we picked  up crates at Target for $3.49 each when the back to school stuff came out.  Sadly, I went back a week or two later and saw them on sale... but I'm going to just try to forget about that part.

Plywood - We are lucky to have a really great maintenance guy where we work, and he agreed to use leftover scraps of wood he had at school and to cut the plywood seats for us once we bought the crates!  He even cut little angled corners so there would be room for the fabric in the corners.  Did I mention how lucky we are to have him around?

Fabric - We went back and forth on what to use to cover the seats.  Shower curtains would be easy to clean off and seemed better for those unfortunate lice outbreaks that happen, but they didn't seem very durable.  Regular fabric seemed too thin.  We thought that outdoor canvas type fabric would be ideal, but it was $20/yd.  Lucky for us, JoAnn fabric ran a sale where it was 60% off, and I had a coupon for an extra 25% off.  Seemed like a good enough deal for us.

Foam - Knowing how expensive those foam sheets can be, we opted to go with a mattress pad, which we picked up at Walmart for about $11.  It was enough to make 7 crates (3 for her and 4 for me) stacking them two high for extra padding, with some left over.

Ribbon - to create the pull tab
Staple gun and staples

We doubled the foam on top of the fabric and stacked the plywood on top, then stapled it all down, being careful to tuck the corners in as much as possible.  After it was all stapled, we tacked on the ribbon loop.

Here are some pictures of the finished products for the Second Grade room.  We still have 4 more crates to finish for Third Grade!

Happy Birthday

I love walking through the clearance aisles trying to find something I can use in the classroom.  I was at Kohl's and found this photo holder, which was on sale for $1.99.  I had been planning to buy a little sparkly party decoration to sit at a child's spot when it was their birthday, but this turned out even better!  I created some little pictures to go on the side of the cube, modge podged those and some little confetti stars on the base, and then bought a premade bow and tied it around the top.  It still has the picture holder stems, which is where I plan to put a homework pass (created with Vistaprint) for the birthday student on their special day!