Gettin' A Little Crafty & Erin Condren FINALLY!!

So, over than being completely overwhelmed since basically August 1st... I have gotten a little crafty since school started. Although I probably could have been a little craftier but I've been wearing out my cowboy boots like it's my job. Anyone in the south looking for a roomie? Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Chris Cagle, Craig Morgan, Josh Turner, Joe Nichols, Thompson Square have all seen my cowboy boots lately. Oh, don't worry Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan have seen them twice ;) Justin Moore will see them this upcoming weekend as well!! So needless to say country music has distracted me a bit, as has college football which started this weekend. Go Gators!! Anyway onto the craftiness...

Quite a few people asked me about the magnets seen here:

To be honest, I'm not sure how ya'll even noticed those little glittery guys. So I needed another set, and I knew my teammate was eyeing them up, so I decided to make another set. I have to say in advance, I forgot to take after pictures, so this will be an updated post tomorrow after I take pictures at school :)

Here's my wonderful (winky, awful face) tutorial :)

 {1: gather supplies}

{mod podge} 

{glass marbles w/flat bottom} 

{some kind of glitter}

{2: spread out supplies, grab marble with flat side up}

{3: spread a THIN (thick takes forever to dry) layer of glue on flat bottom}

note: i have tried brushes of all kinds, my finger worked best, it's messy, but that's okay!!

{4: lay out to dry on scrap paper}

{lay out as many as you want of one color on a piece of paper}

{5: once finished with one set, get glitter ready}

{6: apply glitter generously, remember you can save excess glitter}

{7: repeat steps 2-6 over for each color you want to do}

{8: let them dry overnight}

 {9: you shouldn't see any white glue left when you turn them over}

{10: either use a glue gun, or these fab-o glue dots!}

{11: and these wonderful magnets... the thin ones don't work well}

{12: place the glue dot carefully on the glitter, then stick and press the magnet on that}

{13: write the numbers on! woot!}
*if they fall, the magnet may fall off, just reapply another glue dot!*

Onto other crafty things... I gained 2 new teammates this year which is fabulous!! I am loving both of them! Plus I love my other teammate who I plan and do all of my projects with. I decided to make them something to start their year off :) 

 {outside of their box - minus this one's name}

 {inside of one of the boxes - all items we all need!}

{all 3 of the boxes in different colors}

Sometimes we all have kiddos that need charts, papers, or things and I needed somewhere to keep that stuff. He loves basketball so I thought this would be a bit of encouragement, and a little less girly than the zebra one I was storing the stuff on.

 {front and back of the basketball clipboard - i love those textured sports ball papers!!}

I kept on fighting the whole "Where Are We" chart so students could put a magnet or whatever for where they are. I've never really needed it, because I've only really had kiddos that go to the bathroom, occasionally another teacher, or occasionally the nurse. Well I have quite a few kiddos that leave and go to numerous other places on different days all throughout the day. I can barely keep track of things. So I broke down and made my own version of "Where Are We" It hangs right on the window near the door so as they leave they remember. Once I made myself one, my teammate wanted one as well, so here they are:

 {obviously mine is the black one, I only wish bathroom wasn't so long, but I guess I can't be too picky!!}

{this is also why I made yet another set of the magnets above}

That's all of my craftiness... then came along Erin Condren. FINALLY!! OMG!! In case you can't tell, I was excited (still am). I checked my phone every 2 minutes to see if my order had shipped. The day I knew it came, I'm surprised I didn't get a speeding ticket. I got home so fast! I wanted to rip it open, I even started to, but then I thought I should share my joy with you. So here it goes:

 Now here she is tonight:

And yes, it would have been well worth the speeding ticket had I have gotten one on the way home. I'm so in love with it. She goes everywhere with me, back and fourth, between home and school. It has the gradebook part, the calendar part, the weekly lesson plan pages, and.... drumroll please... STICKERS with all of the important things (like drill, iep meeting, staff meeting, etc.).

If you don't have one, I highly recommend it. It's SO WORTH it!! I promise. I kept putting it off because I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend all that money on one, when school gives up both planners and gradebooks (I should mention they are the most boring planners/gradebooks known to man though). I actually wish I wouldn't have put it off all summer, because then I would have had it before school started. She had a sale in August where you got free pens and stuff so that finally made me do it!! (And I should note, in no way did I get this as a giveaway or did she ask me to post this or anything, I just needed to brag about it! LOL! I also thought someone may have been hesitant like me, and needed a real opinion!!)

If you want to check it out, here's where you can find it on her page:

{teacher's planner}

That's the stuff I have now, but there are about 5 million other things I want to share with you. A few new things I've been making and implementing in my classroom. I promise I'll get on that this week. I also noticed I have over 1500 visitors on both here and facebook, so I'm in the process of coming up with a giveaway! If I can get over this cold I'll do it ASAP :) I hope ya'll had a great weekend!! Football starts Wednesday, if that doesn't get you excited I don't know what will!! :)

Valentine Globes, Pronouns, Fractions

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm a huge fan of change. I constantly need to be moving things around at home and at school. I've always been this way. My poor Dad used to go crazy because I would move my furniture ALL the time! So we just finished lots of units and we're moving onto new things so I'm totally excited. I'm also half changing some of my room in order to prepare (hopefully) for next year. I'm going all black with bright colors, look at the way I designed my blog and you'll see how my room will be! I'm beyond excited about it! I figured I'll try a few things this year, and then if it works I'll do it next year.

In the mean time we decided we needed to make our room more festive. We still had the snowflakes hanging all over the room. I wanted to make huge Valentine's fortune cookies, but it just wasn't happening. So instead we created these:

So now our former winter wonderland, looks like this:

Now I honestly wish they were much bigger. Here's the problem. My teammate and I made these, so between the 2 of us we needed 800 circles. 200 of each color. So that's a lot of circles. The project is already difficult enough without having to worry about kiddos cutting decent circles. We have an Ellison Die Cut at school. One of our dies is a circle. My teammates TA cut out all the circles (major props to her!). I attempted to cut one globe worth on my little circle cutter, but that took long enough. So basically in order to be the most efficient we had to deal with the size we had. I still needed more patience than was available for this project. They worked though and it gives it a bit of Valentine's flair!!

We started our Pronouns unit. I would have thought pronouns would have been easy peasy for the kiddos! WRONG! They couldn't get the idea that pronouns weren't just replacing nouns with other nouns. Example:

Me: I ate a hot dog at the baseball game. What word can we say instead of hot dog?
Them: A hamburger!
Them: Pizza!
Them: Popcorn!
Me: (in my head) Oh my goodness, I wasn't thinking it was going to go like this!

We'll see how pronoun pizza's go tomorrow! I'll be sure to post pictures of our yummy pizzas once we're finished! Anyone ever have one of those days when you're thinking... oh no... one of those days? Yea that was today!

We also just started on fractions today. I'm so excited for this, because I love fractions! We drew some today using grid paper. That was another OMG moment! I have to say though, my favorite math unit is fractions. I always either do fraction sundaes or fraction gumball machines. I'm beyond excited to spice it up a bit with 3rd graders instead of firsties.

I'm also thinking of doing something Super Bowl related with fractions this Friday. We shall see. The kiddos loved this ordered pair project I gave them to do when they finished their work last week, so maybe I'll do the same kind of thing!

Has anyone done literature circles? I'm just bored with Guided Reading. I desperately need to spice it up! I think it's the fact that it's 3rd graders! Firsties are exciting, they're learning how to read. Third graders know how to read... I dunno maybe it's just a phase!

By the way, I HAVE to share about 2 assembly type things. For the past 3 years (and I think longer) my school has had a company called Historical Perspectives come to our school. They got Harriet Tubman this year. She came and pretended like she was Harriet Tubman. I loved it! We had Helen Keller last year, and someone the year before. I know they're in the Chicago area, but I don't know about anywhere else. If you're ever looking for a good historical assembly look them up, they were great.

I also am like beyond excited! When I taught first we studied Space. Well we have some colleges near by that have planetariums, but we could never get in. Or we had too many kids to go on one day, then it got expensive! We have the Adler Planetarium downtown Chicago, but that's expensive and in Chicago traffic (insert shuddering here) it would never work! So I somehow found a company with a dome that they set up at your school! They worked with me last year to set it all up within like a week. It was all such short notice. So we're doing it again this year. I planned it so 3rd and 1st get to see it. It's one of the coolest things! The best part is we don't have to worry about paying/dealing with busses! If you study Space I highly recommend it! :)

Only 4 More Days... 4 More...

So my bloggy friends... apparently on Friday someone decided to take my well mannered, extremely wonderful class of 25 third graders and replaced them with some loud, unruly, rude children. I'm thoroughly convinced there is NO possible way those kids that were in room 127 on Friday are my kiddos. I'm horrified at what 8:50 a.m. will bring my way. I pray to the school Gods that they bring back my normal children for the next 4 days. Heck, I don't even care if they get crazy on Thursday, be my guest. I'll trade an INSANE Thursday for a normal, calm Monday-Wednesday. Please. I'm begging you! On another note, I'm so jealous of everyone already on break, but with that said, I'm ubber excited to not be on break until Friday. I feel like when we used to have the week before Christmas off, you spent all of your break getting ready for the holidays, then only had a few days to recoup. I will get off Friday and not return until January 9. I'm a million times excited about it!

So here's a few things we've been busy creating. I've been doing all projects with my wonderful neighbor/teammate (so no, I don't have 60 kids in my class LOL)

Mrs. Jumps Snowglobes (via 3rd graders)

{we modified/enlarged them a bit to fit more writing}

  

 

They did a fabulous job!!

Here's the dictionary project!! They did AWESOME!! :)

I'm not really sure where "He's like a little ruler and a little king" came from...

 {idioms central}

{truthfully I'm embarrassed to put these on here - but these are both things I couldn't find much help with, so I thought maybe my ugly little charts can help someone out there in bloggy land - yes I'm a perfectionist who can't stand anything handwritten}

So that brings me this... My kiddos are going to be making their handprint ornaments for their parents tomorrow. I know, I know they do it every year, but I think it's cute to see how your kids hands have grown over the years. I am also making the parents an ornament for them to have. So here is what I made... it's hard to get the full picture because I blurred out the kids faces, but you get the point!

{24 clear ornaments - Hobby Lobby}

[plus I have a child that doesn't celebrate Christmas so I'm making his Mom a frame!]

{boys got green background paper, plus green/black ribbon}

{girls got red background paper, plus red/white ribbon}

After trying to make some last night in the dark, I gave up and left a mess on the floor. I returned to them this morning when there was a lot of light and quickly finished all of them. I was getting very frustrated last night though!! I also got each kid a copy of Sideways Stories from Wayside School because they were $1 each from Scholastic. Can't beat that!!

On a side note, we have a radio station here in Chicago with a morning show called "Eric and Kathy" I absolutely LOVE them. I get very upset if they're not on in the morning. So I'm a "fan" of them on Facebook. They randomly post things on there, like questions about holidays and things. I always look, but hardly ever respond. Well I took an afternoon nap, yes I adore napping! When I woke up {usually I'm grumpy as it is when I wake up from anything} I see a post that says something along the lines of  "Has everyone's children brought home their homemade ornaments yet?" I thought cute! Let's see what kids are bringing home. The responses I saw ENRAGED me!! People were complaining about their typical "foam" picture frames, and "all 3 of my kids brought home the same ornament, they did every year!" People then proceeded to say teacher's lack creativity and some said, "well I guess they won't put much thought into the gift, I won't put much thought into their gift either." 

So I went into a rage-ful post back to those people about how I spend thousands of dollars on my classroom, plus $30 on books, plus probably another $30 or more on the ornament supplies for them, and me to make. I also said I have to pay for presents for my own family and I don't make a ton, so I do what I can. I mentioned that it takes an hour or 2 to make ornaments for 30 kids. Needless to say I was NOT happy! I couldn't believe how ungrateful they were being. So the point of this is that even though I don't have kids, I appreciate everyone who takes the time to make things with their kids, even if it is a "thoughtless cheap foam frame" {ugh, angry posting this now!}. Please don't let anyone make you feel as under appreciated as I felt when I read that post!!

Anyway peeps :) I hope you are enjoying your vacation or last week before the holidays! I wish you the best of luck with your kiddos behaving! If anyone wants directions on the ornaments let me know and I'll make a post, it took me a few tries to really figure out what I should do in order to get them to work! 

Night lovelies! ;-)