Give Away

Kristin over at A Teeny Tiny Teacher is having a give away since she has reached 500 followers, I can only hope that some day I will have that many followers :)

Anyway, she is giving away a $25 gift card to Target!  Head on over and join her give away and congrats to Kristin to having 500 followers!

Currently...September version

Oh' Boy 4th Grade is having a Currently Linky Party again.  I loved reading everyone's last time so I thought I would join again.  So read what I am currently doing and then hop on over to Oh' Boy 4th Grade and see what everyone else is currently doing.  Please follow my blog and leave a comment!

diligent JOY

I wanted to take a minute to let everyone know about a new blog I am following called diligent JOY.  It is a new blog by my lifelong friend Megan.  She just recently moved to Cuenca, Ecuador to teach for 1 year.  For the past couple of years she has been a teacher in Iowa, teaching both Spanish and Kindergarten.  Megan has traveled to Ecuador during the summer months to teach there so she is well aware of what she is getting herself into.  She will be blogging about her journey teaching in Ecuador and what life is like there.  She recently posted about what kinds of food she eats there which I found fascinating and interesting.  Megan and I also have plans to have our students be pen pals, which will be such a great learning experience, especially for my rural Wisconsin students.  So, if you have time I highly suggest you go over and check out/follow her blog, I can not wait to hear about all of her experiences teaching in Ecuador!

Clipboard Bin-DIY

So, I was inspired by so many blogs this summer and all the teachers that do their own projects for their classrooms I decided to do a few myself.  I like to think that I am becoming more crafty but I will let you be the judge of that.  Earlier this summer, I also made stools on crates, you can see that post here. 

My next project was to make a bin for my clipboards in my room.  I inherited a yellow tub during the spring/summer and had yet to find a use for it until I was organizing my classroom and I could not find a good spot to put my clipboards so I decided to convert the yellow tub into the clipboard tub.



First, I grabbed my yellow tub.

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Second, I marked off the areas I wanted to spray paint with the chalk board paint with blue painters tape.



 

I painted both sides in case both sides of the tub would be showing in my classroom.



This is the chalk board spray paint that I used, bought at Home Depot.



This is what the tub looked like after I sprayed it, once it was dry I carefully peeled off the paint and it was perfect.



Here is the finished project in my classroom with all of our clipboards.  This tub sits near the Work on Writing area for Daily 5 so the students have different ways they can write or can go and write on one of the comfy chairs in the classroom.



So, that is my DIY project for this week.  I will be showing you another project I did for my classroom library that I love!

First Day Back for Teachers

Well, today was the first day teachers had to report back to school and it did not go as planned.  Our school district had hired Corwin Kronenberg to be our speaker at our opening day of in-service but he had to cancel due to an illness.  So, instead we gained more time in our classrooms!  YEA, that does not usually happen!  Plus, we will gain additional time to work in our classrooms tomorrow since our building meetings were moved to today.

Although we gained extra time today, my anxiety level is still increasing.  I had one of the students on my caseload move away and now I have gained a student that moved into our district so I have quite a few things I need to fix (add the student's name) before Tuesday, but that is not too bad if that is my only change so far.

We have 2 1/2 more days in our classrooms this week so hopefully I will have my final classroom pictures up by the end of the week.  So for now, I am off to write IEP snapshots for the classrooms teachers.

I'm Back

So I have been gone for a while, it has been pretty busy around here the last week.  We start with in-service on Monday so I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to get things ready at school so I can use our in-service days to just finish up a couple of details.

Last week I spent two days at an Institute for Healthy Kids, where I learned some good things about incorporating yoga into the classroom and how to make some healthy recipes.  I am excited to try some of these great ideas in my classroom and it also reinforced the idea that students need to MOVE throughout the school day.  I think we heard that elementary students are only able to focus for 5-7 minutes at a time and then they are unable to take in any more information or learn.  When I hear that time limit, it really makes we re-evaluate the way I teach and that I need to add more movement breaks into our schedule.  Has anyone out there used student yoga in the classroom?  It seems like a great idea and a way to teach students how to give themselves a break or rejuvenate their bodies...

Last week I also had my first class of RECESS which is a action research class that our school district participates in with UW-Madison.  It stands for Rural Educators Collaborating to Ensure Student Success.  I also participated in RECESS last year and loved it, I learned so much more about my students and my own teaching and I am thankful to be able to participate again this year.  So, we pick something that we want to work on in our classrooms and with our students and then we research it throughout the school year.  At the end of the school year we go down to UW-Madison and present our findings.  It is such a great opportunity and it is nice to present to other people what I am doing in my classrooms to help my students succeed.

Well, that is about it for right now.  I have also been really busy with a couple more DIY projects that I will post later this week and I will also be posting pictures of my finished classroom soon, I have been working hard on it and would not be even close to being done without my awesome husband and all of his hard work on Sunday (thanks)!  Only a couple more details to finish...yea!

Parent Communication Log

Here is the Parent Communication Log I plan on using this school year.  Since I contact parents a lot throughout the school year I have a different log for each student that will all be kept in the same binder with their Student Contact Sheet.  Please feel free to download this Log, just follow my blog!  Thanks