All For the Love of Teaching: July 2014

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am running a summer book club for twelve girls. Nothing is more rewarding then being around children who love to read and thirst for knowledge. It has been a summer full of deep thinking, questioning, crafting, and most of all; LOTS OF READING!

I chose three books for us to read this summer. The first book that we read was Flora and Ulysses. This was an adorable and inspiring tale about a girl and her super squirrel! The girls absolutely loved this book.

This book was written with comic book inserts and illustrations throughout. In an effort to teach the girls about the use of onomatopoeia in comics, we created our very own pop art! By using paint and cotton swabs, the girls were able to create their very own works of art.

I have quite the group of artists! Here are some of their finished creations.

The next book we read was The Penderwicks. This was a story of summer adventure and the bond between sisters. The girls loved this book as well and they could all really relate to it. It gave us wonderful opportunities to make text-to-self connections.

The setting of this book was an adorable cottage with a beautiful garden. One of the main characters was a botanist! I wanted to do an activity that had to do with flowers, but it needed to be rather quick. This book required a lot of discussion and I knew the craft would need to be quick and easy.

We created flower pens! We used washi tape, artificial flowers, and ballpoint pens. As simple as this activity was, the girls LOVED it! They were so excited to use their new flower-pen creations!

The final book we are reading is Everything on a Waffle.

I have big plans for activities for this book! Stay tuned for updates on my next book club meeting!

With school fast approaching, I have been hard at work preparing for the new school year. I can't wait to see the adventures that this new school year has to offer!

It seems this year the back-to-school sales have come out sooner than ever! I woke up this morning, grabbed my coffee, and scanned the sales papers for good deals. I was able to find quite a few!

Scissors were 25 cents each

Highlighters were 1 dollar each

Pens were 1 dollar for 10. I bought green for proofreading and red for checking.

Crayons and Colored Pencils were also 25 cents each! I am fairly certain the cashier thought I had lost my mind, but when I pulled out my TeacherPerks card, he knew what I was up to. He proceeded to give me the run down of what would be on sale from now until the beginning of the school year. How exciting is that!

This year, I wanted a way for the students to differentiate my supplies from their own. By mid-year I glance in the supply bins and notice that half of them are gone. I don't mind replenishing them, but I wanted to find a way to mark my class set. It makes it so much easier when we are working to clean up the room if we know which ones go in the supply bins and which go in their pencil boxes.

I bought a roll of chevron washi tape. I cut it into small pieces and marked each of the supplies. It will make things so simple this year and I am thrilled to see how it will work!

Here are my supplies all labeled! (eek!)

I came across this gem at a garage sale this week! It's a spinning scissor stand. It is adorable and will work wonderfully in my classroom.

I also was able to get a great deal on Expo markers this week. I often use whiteboards as a way to informally asses during my math groups, spelling groups, etc... Before group, I always have to pass out an eraser, Expo marker, and whiteboard to each student. I saw this brilliant idea on Pinterest last year and knew I wanted to do it this year!

Gluing a pom-pom to the end of the marker creates a built-in eraser. How awesome is that! I created a class set of these as well hoping to cut down on my supply pass out time.

I bought these adorable supply bins from Dollar Tree! They have so many different options, colors, and styles.

I also picked up the start of my borders for my bulletin boards! Here is a sneak peak of what is to come! Lots of chevron and polka-dots in the future!

I stopped by Target and got a few packages of crazy straws. This was yet another project I saw on Pinterest early in the year and I loved it! The birthday straw bouquet is a cute and simple birthday gift for the students in your classroom.