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Showing posts from June, 2015

TPT Seller Challenge: Dare to Dream!

This week the TpT Challenge was all about why we joined TpT in the first place. I've been working on this post all week, but this was a surprisingly hectic week with our whole house being torn up for new carpeting, painting the nursery, and a few other things! Here is my reasoning for why I do TpT, and why I blog at all, actually! 1. Share resources and learn from other teachers: There is something amazing about teachers. Teachers are willing to share and help each other more than any other group of professionals I've seen. When I first started teaching and blogging, it was so wonderful to learn from others, and to get ideas for everything from classroom management to decorating a classroom. I feel like blogging is so great because it's unedited. Teachers are free to share what they do, and explain if it worked or not. Everything I read in books back in the early 2000's seemed stale to me. It was always these magical strategies that worked perfectly in a

Classroom Management Forms

Yesterday I posted my new Classroom Management Forms pack , which contains all of the forms I use in my classroom to keep things running smoothly and organized. The newest item in that pack is the While You Were Out cover and table, which I decided to have bound in a spiral at Office Depot last night. It was ready to pick up this morning, and I was so excited to go and get it! (I'm a sucker for anything that is bound in a spiral, but these could easily be printed at your school or home and hole punched for a binder). I chose to have the front cover printed in color and laminated, which was an extra $1.50 I created a document with 130 pages of the While You Were out table, and the cover.  This gives me enough pages in case I make some insane mistake, and allows for enough room for my 5 preps! (I will be combining some of them onto the same page for this spiral). My back cover is the 65# Brights, and chose the Cosmic Blue, laminated as well. I also picked the

TPT Seller Challenge: Makeover Madness!

First of all, I would like to start off by saying, CONGRATS TO THE NEW DYNASTY, THE CHICAGO  BLACKHAWKS !! :) There was a lot of rally towel swinging and yelling happening in our house last night, and a lot of fireworks being set off in our neighborhood after the Hawks big win last night. What was a great series! So I saw from Third in Hollywood that they decided to do a TPT Seller Challenge, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to jump on, since I'm heading to the TpT Conference in fabulous Las Vegas in July! For this week's challenge, we were asked to makeover a product in our store, so I decided on my Reading Project Descriptions and Rubrics. These were definitely due for a facelift! This was a fun experience, and in honor of this challenge, and my birthday this Friday, I'm throwing a sale for 20% EVERYTHING in my current TpT store until the 19th!

Interactive Student Notebooks 2.0

You know I love the ISN, but I wanted to make some changes for next year, in terms of how I organize it and utilize it within the classroom. This post will be chock full of pictures of what it looked like this year, and how it will be changing next year! Here's an example of my running ISN table of contents from this year, it was great, but I really felt like it lacked some additional organization. I like having the CCSS on the right, and towards the end of the year, I started printing copies of it for students to save time writing in the Table of Contents in their own notebooks. Here's the ISN TOC for this year! And yes, I've already begun the planning process, in fact, while watching the Blackhawks DOMINATE last night, I ended up planning out the entire year in order to be able to show all of you the new and improved ISN. I also wanted to do this now so that I could relax the rest of the summer. I have two more preps to do this for, but I'm mos

Year-End Round Up!

Over the next week or so, I'm going to talk in depth about some of the things that worked really well for me this year in terms of instruction, building relationships, classroom management, technology, and of course, organization! I couldn't wait to share these, so I had to give a brief overview today! Instruction ISN's: Not a new topic for me, but we did a bit more with it this year, and I was pleased with the results! Writer's Notebooks and Grammar Invitations: Yes! I'm going to talk more about the writer's notebooks, and the grammar invitations, at long last! Writer's Workshop: This strategy grew and blossomed this year, and I really enjoyed the results! Paper Annotation and Checklists: When there isn't time for a full blown workshop, this was a great way for students to self-check their work and take ownership to understand what and how they wrote! Genius Hour: Oh, genius hour, how I loved thee. As did the students. Can't wait t