Monday Made It 8/3/15

I have a quick Monday Made It to share because it was so obvious when I saw them that I HAD to do it!!!

I found these super cute tins in the Dollar Spot at Target.

 SO I naturally felt compelled to buy 2 along with some letter stickers and make ......

New Sharpened and Not Sharpened cups.

What else are you suppose to do with pencil tin cups? Put pencils in them of course.

I also found these cuties in the dollar spot and I love them so much I just had to share.

I couldn't believe it when I found these wood, canvas looking signs in the Dollar Spot (so they were $3, but that's ok). I had to have them and I plan to put them on the window ledge in my class, behind where my co-teacher has her small group table.

Then I found this cute school house shaped chalkboard sign, that I plan to write an inspirational quote on and put on the ledge behind my desk. 

If you have any suggestions for inspirational quotes, I'll take any suggestions. Look for these gems when I post my classroom reveal in late August/early September.

Remember if you made something link up with Tara from 4th Grade Frolics and share what you made!!!

Sight Word Activities & Freebies - Monday Made It 7/6/15

It's Monday and my first day of summer school, and because of that I was a busy bee this weekend making some centers for my kiddos, so I thought I would link up with Tara from 4th Grade Frolics for her Monday Made It linky.

Since I started summer school today I had to prepare some centers over the weekend.

I know my kiddos need work on their sight words and I needed a way to assess their current knowledge, but I didn't want to use flash cards. So I created a powerpoint for each of the Dolch sight words that automatically transitions after 3 seconds, since they should be able to name the word within 3 seconds. If you think you could use this you can get the file here from Google Drive.

Once I've assessed what words they know and what they need work with, I made a few activities or resources to help with that.

I made these sight word flip cards for each of the Dolch word sets (3rd grade isn't shown here, I know I won't need them this summer, so I just have to finish them before the school year starts). My kiddos can use them to read into Whisper Phones, write, or do another activity with. They are all color coded, so it's easy for me to tell a kiddo to grab the yellow words. You can grab yours here.

I also made Dolch Sight Word sticks to go with Reagan from Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits sight word stick center. You can read her post about them here. You can buy your copy of the center from her Tpt shop here. So to go with these I made the Dolch words so they would fit on popsicle sticks.

I sized the words to fit onto the popsicle stick. Cut them to fit, then used packing tape to secure them onto the popsicle sticks.

I put each set into a Crystal Light container & labeled the outside with what list it was. They are also color coordinated. You can grab your pre-sized Dolch lists here to fit on popsicle sticks of your own here.

The last thing I made for my kiddos to practice their sight words were shakers, since I had these old parmesan cheese containers laying around, so I cleaned them and got ready to put them to use.

I typed up the different Dolch lists and printed them on card stock. You can get your lists here and all you have to do is print them. 

Cutting them up was probably the most difficult part because it was time consuming and made my wrist hurt.

Here are some of the things I picked up to fill the containers with. I got salt, rice, small shell pasta, beads, pom-pons, and confetti. I got all of this stuff from the dollar store, except for the rice, but that was under a dollar from Wal-Mart.

I started by putting some of the words at the bottom of the container.

Then I added a layer of filler, in this photo it was pasta shells.

Then I added another layer of words.

Here's the finished product. Make sure to leave some room at the top so the kiddos can "shake it up!!!"

I finished them off by putting clear packing tap on the lid so the kiddos could open them. I also labeled them ( color coded), so we can easily identify which list is in which container.

I also made a shaker for addition and subtraction facts. Addition facts to sums of 20 and subtraction facts starting at 20. If you would like your copy you can grab them here. 

Here are all the shakers finished.

I hope you can use these freebies to help you make some of these activities. Enjoy!!!

Monday Made It & a GIVEAWAY - Brights & Polka Dot Classroom Decor

I feel like I've been neglecting this little blog of mine because I haven't posted anything since Thursday & honestly I've barely been blog stalking either {gasp}. I know, I know. Shame on me. But my Monday Made It is the reason why I've been so absent lately. I'm FINALLY FINISHED my classroom decor pack. I got a spurt of inspiration to finish this weekend. So I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics for Monday Made It to show it off & host a win-it before you can buy it giveaway.

First I have to give a shout out to Jivey for her post about using Picasa to make collages to use as previews and A+ Firsties for her post specifically on Picasa. I've used Picasa before but it's nice to have a point of reference when doing something for the first time.

With that here are the previews for the different components of my Brights & Polka Dots Classroom Decor pack. Each picture will be linked to my Tpt store by the end of the week, but for now I will be hosting a giveaway to win the entire pack before it goes up in the store.

Alphabet Posters

Calendar Pieces

Days in School Cards

Do you keep track of how many days you've been in school, as a part of your calendar area? These pieces will be perfect for that.

Daily Schedule Header

Let your kiddos know what will happen during the day with schedule cards.

EDITABLE Schedule Cards

Use these editable cards (in Powerpoint) to fit your specific classroom schedule.

Name Tags

Perfect for the kiddos desks.

Number Posters

Class Set of Numbers

Need numbers for your students cubbies, folders, book bins, etc. Here they are.

Word Wall Headers

I will be creating Dolch Sight Word cards for the different lists to go with this pack & if I have time I'll also make the Fry words.

Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow

WIN THIS WHOLE PACK!!!

Everything will be up in my store by the end of the week, individually & as a bundle. Enter the giveaway below to win it!!! The giveaway will run from July 22 to July 26. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Monday Made It & a FREEBIE!!!

I'm finally doing it, I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics for Monday Made It...I think I've only done this once before. I wanted to post this particular Monday Made It last week but I forgot...sorry...I remembered on Tuesday.

Stay tuned to the end of this post for a freebie!!!

This summer I'm working a summer camp, with students from 5 to 13 years old. I know, I know! It's pure insanity. The first 2 days were a nightmare...as you can imagine. Pure chaos! Even though my boss had the best of intentions with her format, it just wasn't working, not with majority boys & the personalities they brought with them. So by day 3 I was like, we need to do centers for the morning academic portion. {We're trying to prevent too much "Summer Slide" from happening} I wanted to make sure that the kids touched upon reading, writing & math with some easy stuff & interesting (at least to them) mixed in. Here are the centers that we have

• Read to Self
• Reading response
• Drawing
• Writing/Picture Prompt
• Math Facts
• Word Games
• Online Math
• Reading Online (which translates to Reading Eggs) 

I'll post another day about what each of these centers looks like, but today's post is about how I organized who went where when! This is what I came up with:

There are 8 centers, so the most groups I have on any given day are 8. Depending on how many groups we have, decides how many centers we do that day. If I don't keep it even like that then I just get myself all confused. These are just printed on regular paper & put inside page protectors so I could write the student's names for each group with dry erase marker & erase for the next day.

On this particular day we had 7 groups, so the students only did 7 rotations, with a break for snack in the middle.

Everything is held on with the sticky putty stuff, sorry I don't know what the technical teacher term for it is, but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

Below are close ups of the center labels & the time labels.

My time & center labels I just printed on yellow & orange card stock, then laminated with my Scotch laminator (another reason why it's so wonderful to have a personal laminator at home). Then I color coded each group, no I did not intentionally make them striped. That happened because my printer is running out of ink. Then I laminated the group cards with my personal laminator. 

It's nothing fancy folks & I don't even know if this is the exact set-up that I would use in my own classroom (most likely not), but it works for summer camp & I thought I would share it. Maybe it'll inspire you to come up with a version that works best for your class. It does let me at least get a visual of how I could potentially set up my rotations.

Now onto the freebie I promised you.

I have 99 likes on my Facebook Page so to celebrate the close proximity to 100 I have set-up my fan freebie page. Thanks so much to Ideas by Jivey and Ms. Fultz's Corner for their blog posts & video tutorials, I was able to set it up easy peasey!!! As some of you may know I've been working on a polka dot classroom decor pack & am slowly moving through it, but in the mean time I've added an item from my pack to my fan freebie page. I just wanted to thank those of you who have liked me on Facebook, just another way for us all to stay connected & share our fabulous ideas!!!

I can't wait to see what everyone has made for Monday Made It & I hope you'll check out my Fan Freebie!!!

Monday Made It: Teacher Gift & Math Game

I'm linking up with Tara from 4th Grade Frolics again today for her Monday Made It linky party.

I have 2 made-its to share.

First, this classroom sign for my secret pal.

I kind of forgot to take a picture of it before I put it in the bag, so I had to quick take it out & unwrap it when I got to school so I could take a picture for you. This was inspired by Amber at Sparkles, Smiles, and Successful Students she had a sign like this from her Monday Made It last week. Thank you Amber you were a huge life-saver. I had no idea what I was going to give my secret pal as an end of the year gift, then I saw hers & I was like "Perfect." This cute little sign was actually pretty easy to make, I picked up a bifold board from WalMart & cut it apart down the middle, then painted it with acrylic paint, also from Wal-Mart, because they're under a $1 there for the little bottle. Added a little design to it and wrote her name with a paint pen, which was under $2. Then hot-glued ribbon to the top. Again, sorry for the bad picture, because you can't see that the ribbon is an orange ribbon with yellow polka dots on the top. Pretty simple and inexpensive and I'll most likely be making one for my room now too.

The second thing I'm sharing is my Addition and Subtraction Wars game. I shared this a few weeks ago for Manic Monday and complete forgot to share it here as well. So I'll give you the link and let you hop over to that post to check out this fun game for your math tubs. Click either picture of the game boards to jump to my post about this fun card game. Pssstt...this game is a freebie. Check out the post and you can scoop this game up from google docs.

One more freebie I want to mention, I'm dabbling in creating fonts, check out my Fonts page for some free fonts.

Wow! I think was one of the shortest posts I've ever done. I hope you were either inspired to create something or are able to use this game in your classroom. Thanks for stopping by. Remember to link up with 4th Grade Frolics and share what you've made.