MIA

Hello bloggy world! Yes it's been a while. I officially suck. I'm sorry for not blogging in forever. Things have been crazy busy this school year! It's safe to say that this year has been my most challenging school year yet! I've been working crazy long hours and I've been exhausted when I get home. But it's no excuse and I'm ready to get back into the swing of things.

I'm gonna ease myself back into the blog world by sharing with you how I organized my classroom library. This summer I had the luxury of having all my classroom stuff stored at my apartment. I've been wanting to get my classroom library organized for years now and this was my opportunity.

I was looking into getting one of those fancy scanners when I came across Booksource's Classroom Organizer. WOW! With this website you can log in all of your books by simply entering the ISBN. Even better, if you have an iPhone, you can download their free app and use your phone to scan the ISBN. It's awesome! Plus, you can add all kinds of information beyond title & author, you can put the price, reading level, location in your classroom & more. You can also export your information into an Excel spreadsheet. I did this and put it in a binder in my classroom and it's made finding my books so much easier.

I figured that since I was already putting each book's information into the database I might as well take the time to level all my books as well. This is where the luxury of being able to do it in my pjs while watching a movie comes in! The first place I turned to to level my books was the Scholastc Book Wizard. Sadly, a lot of the books I had either weren't on the site or they didn't have a level listed. This is where the AR Book Finder  and this Lexile Text Conversion Table came in. Using these, I was able to level almost all of my remaining books.

After getting all my books leveled I started to organize them. I decided to organize them by author and holiday and then sort the rest by level. The books I wasn't able to level I sorted by fiction & non fiction. My most favorite part by far was being able to log in the location of each book.  I was able to put in exactly which bin I was putting the books in. Now when I need to find a book I just look at my spreadsheet, find which bin it's in & grab it! It also makes it easy to lend books to coworkers because they can look up things themselves and get what they need.

The most tedious part was labeling all the books. I printed paper labels and attached them to the books with clear laminate. I made it so that my small labels on the books matched my large bin labels so that children could put them back easier. It was a lot of work but it's so nice to have all 600+ of my books accounted for, labeled and put away neatly!

Check out my TPT store to snag everything I made for my library!  Thanks for hanging in there and staying with me as I traverse this hectic year!

Classroom Tour & Freebies

Hello bloggy friends! I’ve been super busy getting my room ready for Monday. I just finished the physical setup yesterday and now I’m working on lesson planning and getting beginning of the year stuff taken care of.  I am so excited about this year! I really think I’m going to love 1^st grade. I have a great team of ladies I’ll be working with and a lot of fun ideas!

So here’s a little tour of my classroom…

This is the hallway outside of my classroom. I will be creating an interactive bulletin board on the large board and hanging student work from rings on the clothespins. The plan is to write the kiddos names on the clips and add their pictures above their names. I want to keep adding work each month to the ring to create a portfolio of work that parents and other teachers and students will be able to see. The great thing is that the whole hallway belongs to 1^st so we can use the other spaces to hang work as well!

 My door which I totally love! I’ll write the kids names on the owls when I get my roster.

 This is the wall to the left as you walk through the door. Because of the position of the reading loft, I decided to use the small space behind the door as my desk. I love how cozy it is! I never sit at my desk when the kids are in the room so it’s nice to have it tucked away but still accessible if I need something. 

 A horribly blurry (sorry!) close up of my desk! I'll post a better picture when I get in my room tomorrow.

 This is the door to the bathroom between my room and the room next door. Since the door is metal, I plan on applying magnet tape to my reading and math workstation cards and organizing the kiddos that way.  You can also see my math manipulative shelf & sink area.

 This is the wall directly opposite the door.  I’ve since rearranged the desks so it looks a bit different now. I love the huge windows and all of the light they provide. I’m going to try and see if I can do something about the frosted coating on the lower windows. I’d love to be able to have a bird feeder or something like that outside the room for the kids.  The whole group area will be in right corner. I have a rug coming that I plan on putting there.

 The front of my room! I used flat sheets from Walmart to cover my boards. After seeing this post on the Clutter Free Classroom blog, I decided to use all black borders this year. I love how organized it makes everything look.

 My class library! I have a cute rug coming to soften up the area. I also plan on painting the metal shelves white sometime soon. I have A LOT of things to say about how I organized and leveled my library over the summer so be prepared for a more in depth post soon!

 I love how these boards turned out! They are foam board covered in paper and border hung on a nail by a ribbon. I plan on using them for spelling words, Social Studies & Science, vocabulary words or whatever else I might want to do.

This is the wall by my door. You can see the animal goodbye rhymes, my rules and some signs I previously posted.  I think the flower clock is my favorite. Thank goodness for Pinterest!

So as promised, I have freebies for you! A lot of these things are things you can see in the photos of my classroom.

Can’t Sign – I really don't like it when kids say that they can’t do something. I'm all about letting kids know that some things will be difficult but with work, we can get through them. I’m using this little sign as a tool to reinforce that.

Welcome Letters – I printed these on colored paper and hung them in my window. You will notice in the document that instead of a W for welcome I have a M. This is because the W in the font I used is very wide and got cut off. I just hung the M upside down and it looks fine.  I've made them for K-5.

K 1 2 3 4 5

Classroom Rules – This year I plan on using Whole Brain Teaching techniques in my classroom and I tweaked my rules accordingly. You can get more info on their website here.

Brownie Points – I use the as a whole class incentive. I use these with the cookie sheet hanging on my whiteboard. Every time the whole class makes a good choice, a brownie goes in the pan. When the pan is filled I bring in brownies as a special snack!

Sub Binder Form – I’m currently getting my sub binder together. This is a form I made for the sub to fill out for me.

Brain Breaks – I laminated these and glued them on popsicle sticks. I plan on using these small activities to help my kids when they need a little break.

Thank You Letters – I plan on taking a class picture with my kiddos holding these up. I will then print the picture on half of a sheet of paper and fold it to make a thank you card.

I hope that everyone is having a great week so far. I hope you can use these freebies in your room. Thanks for letting me share my classroom with you!

Every Day I'm Pinterestin'

I'm starting to realize just how little is left of my summer. Since I'm new at my school, I have to report on July 23rd, a week earlier than the other teachers. That leaves me with only 28 days left of summer! Yikes!

I'd like to introduce you to my new best friend, Mr. Laminator.

I picked this guy up for about $28 bucks at Walmart. He's fantastic! My favorite part is that it uses pouches to laminate. You just put your stuff inside and run them through. Since all the machine does it heat up the plastic pouch, you can run it through more than once if there are any gaps or air bubbles. The quality of the film is much better too.

So anyone who knows me could tell you that I am in love with Pinterest. It's such a great way to get your creative juices flowing! Between jury duty and babysitting this past week I have been busy completing a bunch of DIY projects. Behold the cuteness...

So as you can see, I've been very busy! Here are a few specifics if you'd like to make some of these things yourself.

 I got the idea for the teacher toolbox here. I love how it turned out! I got my box at Home depot for about $17 and spray painted it. Then printed out my labels, laminated them and attached them with clear tape to the inside of the drawers. If you'd like to use the labels I made I've uploaded them for you here. I've also included some blank ones if you'd like to print them out on colored paper instead. I've added them as images so all you need to do is insert text boxes to add your own text.

The framed signs are some internet finds that I love put in document frames from Dollar Tree. I got the first one here and the second one here. I downloaded them and tweaked the colors to match my classroom using Photoshop.

I hope that you all are having a great start to your week. Happy Pinteresting!

I'm Still Here + Freebies!

 Hello all! I've been enjoying some much needed R&R time but I'm back and ready to share some of what I've been up to! The first few weeks of break were dominated by a lot of sleeping in, baking, sewing, & hours of watching my new obsession, Game of Thrones. Unfortunately it's also included many hours of jury duty which has not been as enjoyable. I'm a little over halfway finished with my 8 days so I'm thankful for that!

As of right now, I don't know a whole lot about next year so my main focus has been mostly organizing my stuff and undertaking little craft projects. I'm supposed to be having lunch with my new division team sometime soon so I'll be able to know more about the meat & potatoes of what I'll be teaching next year.  

 

I've been wanting one of those 10 drawer carts for quite some time but I haven't been willing to drop the $70-$100 that some places charge for them. So you can imagine my delight when I found one for $30 at Walmart! When I got it home, I wasn't too impressed with the colors so I decided to use some spray paint to make the drawers match my new classroom color scheme.

 Pretty cute huh?

I'm all about affordable storage so I use copy paper boxes to store a lot of my things. I love them because I get them free from the teacher's lounge and they are nice and sturdy. What I don't love about them is that they are pretty ugly.

 See what I mean?

So as I was sitting in my apt. one night I was looking at the boxes and decided to try to use a little craft paint to make them cuter. I love the way they turned out!

I am seriously in love with how cute & organized everything is now. 

So to make up for my absence, I've got some freebies for you! The first is a few line up songs and rhymes I found around the internet that I plan to use with my kiddos. I'm gonna glue these to scrapbook paper and hang them a ring by my door for line up time. The second freebie is some animal goodbye rhymes. I'm going to put these on scrapbook paper and make a poster to use at the end of the day. I hope you enjoy them!

Line Up Songs

Animal Goodbye Rhymes

Well, I'm off to do a bit of pinning and blog hopping while I wait to be released from jury duty for the day. Happy Tuesday everyone!

Money, Money, Money... Money!

 I have had the O'Jays - For The Love Of Money stuck in my head for the last 3 days as we've started learning about money this week! 

We started the unit by talking about the coins using the adorable poems pictured below. They really help! My favorite part of the lesson was when I was discussing why we have coins with my kiddos. I explained that coins were a way to break down the 100¢ that equals a dollar. I asked why I couldn't just use half a dollar to pay for something that costs 50¢ since they are worth the same. I pulled out a fake paper dollar and ripped it in half and they went crazy! There were lots of surprised looks and hushed whispers along with shouts of "She really ripped it! She ripped a dollar!" It was too funny!

 To practice coin recognition we played a fun game where I gave the kids a 5x5 grid and a handful of play money. They placed one coin in each square. I rolled a number cube with pictures of the coins and they removed whichever coin I landed on. The first one to clear off their board wins! I used the following cards to help those who had some trouble distinguishing the coins. I printed mine on colored card stock and attached coin die cuts from Dollar Tree.

You can get the blank cards here.

Next week we are going to play money bingo. This game is bingo with a twist. Kids who still need help matching coins with their values will randomly choose a coin and place it with it's amount to get 4 in a row. Those kids who have this down will roll a number cube to determine the number of coins they can choose and add them together to match to the values & get 4 in a row. You can find the file in my TPT store here.

I hope all of you are having a fabulous Friday! TGIF!

Glitter, To-Do Lists, & Freebies!

As I'm driving home today, the sunlight hits me just right and I realize that I am just covered in glitter. I mean like creepy sparkly vampire covered. I was working on a project today so I figured I probably had some on me but I had no idea! Thank God I didn't have any after work errands to run. Has that ever happened to y'all? It never fails for me: after work errand + close proximity to a cute guy = definite smudge of paint, marker, glitter, or some other kind of crafty schmutz on my face that I find after the fact. It just comes with the job I guess.

So, they say that a clear desk equals a clear mind. I'm not so sure my mind is all that clear but man, look at my desk!

(Insert chorus of angels here.) I've been in hyper organization mode lately and my desk was a recent project.  My desk is usually pretty neat but of course I've been in the mood to streamline everything so now it's uber neat!. So that brings me to what I have for you today. More freebies! If you look closely at my desk you will see my to do list. Its just a piece of paper I printed and put in a frame from Dollar Tree. I just use a dry erase marker to write stuff and erase when I'm done! 

The one you see is what I made at the beginning of this school year. I've recently revamped it to match my new color scheme and cute labels. Now, if only I could pick which one I want to use first! You will find the one pictured above as well as the new ones below. Enjoy!

Black & White To Do List

Green To Do List

Orange To Do List

Pink To Do List

All four are also in my TPT store here.

Oh, and before I forget, the super awesome digital paper I've been using to create my stuff can be found at Mel Stampz awesome blog here. Happy Wednesday!

Welcome to The Teacher Brain

So after many many months of blog stalking and using the great ideas I've been finding I've decided to take the plunge and start a blog of my own!  So you might find yourself wondering, "The teacher brain? What the heck is that?" Well I'm glad you asked! The teacher brain is the part of your brain that kicks in a random times and makes you think "Oh! I could so use this for a lesson!" In my case it also causes extreme excitement over office supplies, a desire to laminate anything and everything, and many hours spent excitedly perusing Teachers Pay Teachers & Pinterest every week. I love having a teacher brain and sharing the fun the stuff that it comes up with. I hope you will enjoy it too!

Because I'm so excited about this blog, I'm starting things off by sharing some freebies! These are some business card size labels that I've made that I'm going to use to organize my things as I'm packing up for the summer. I'm including the blank files and the ones with text that I'll be using. Enjoy! 

Pink Blank Labels

Orange Blank Labels

Green Blank Labels

Pink Labels With Text

Orange Labels With Text

Green Labels With Text