Black and Bright Back to School Resources

Happy Tuesday!

I don't know about you, but I am soaking in every last minute of the summer before we head back to school.  However, I couldn't help but get a jump start on things for my classroom.

This year I'm planning to use black and brights as my classroom theme.  What do I mean?  Well, check out these ideas below and the links!

As with all projects, with every theme comes my own modifications.  My old alphabet and number line have seen a few classroom moves and needed to be ditched.  Instead of going with the typical number line from a teacher store, I decided to design my own to match my theme for this year.  Check them out below! :)  If you like them, the links to my Teacher's Pay Teachers Store are included.

Colorful Number Line and Cursive Alphabet Bundle

Colorful Number Line    Colorful Cursive Alphabet Line

Black and Brights Classroom Ideas

1. Objective Headers from Learning in Wonderland

2. Colorful Baskets: 2nd Grade Stuff

Supply Organization: Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits

Free Font Monday!

Alright y'all!  I have a fun freebie for you today!  I am an absolute font snob and I spent the majority of the afternoon working on these awesome new fonts while my husband watched the World Cup Final.  He was SO excited that Germany won.  I really like the World Cup because it gave me an excuse to talk to him at camp four years ago and now we're married. ;)

Anyway, the fonts are free for personal use.  You can grab them over at Teachers Pay Teachers.  My only request is that you credit the site if you use them on anything that gets published for free.  :)

The link to the fonts is here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Sweet-Teacher-Fonts-1323317

You can also follow me on Teachers Pay Teachers if you like them! :) I hope you enjoy!

Happy Creating!
Katie

Life Cycles and Project Work

I have the amazing privilege of working for a charter school that utilizes project-based learning as one of their core values.  Each quarter we get the chance to work on one major project that integrates elements of the the North Carolina Essential Standards and Math and Language Common Core standards to produce high quality work that is both meaningful to the student and that teaches them the skills of a twenty-first century learner.  I don't care who you are, high-stakes testing doesn't even hold a candle to the skills and abilities that we get a chance to cultivate in our classrooms on a daily basis through our project work.  My kids LOVE it, they are genuinely curious and it perpetuates natural curiosity and inquiry because of the level of student interest.

I could ramble on for DAYS about how much I enjoy our quarter long projects, but instead I thought I would share with you some of the work that we did over the quarter and show you the work that displayed at our project celebration.

We launched our trip with an inquiry based trip to the Museum of Life and Science in Durham.  There, the students had the opportunity to visit the butterfly house where they participated in a workshop that focused on the life cycle of the butterfly.  From that visit we built our understanding of life cycles based on the knowledge that we had gained from our life cycle experience at the Museum of Life and Science.

Upon our return we began to brainstorm how we could turn our classroom into a museum about life cycles by the end of the project.  We thought about the necessary elements of a museum and the things we might need to include in our room and in our studies to make sure that we were able to create a museum of our learning in our classroom.  Now, I had already mapped out this project before we brainstormed our ideas, thinking ahead about what ideas they might develop.  After their initial ideas were collected, I modified some of my plans to meet the student interests, while continuing to focus upon the necessary standards that I needed to cover with this unit.

Knowing that our museum would be focused on life cycles, we launched into a study of various animal life cycles.  We tried to focus on a read aloud and a diagram of the life cycle that students had a chance to make after learning different facts about animal life cycle.  We studied the life cycle of the honey bee, lady bug, chicken, turtle and frog.  We also wanted to make sure that the students knew the expectations for the quality of their work, so we began by introducing our beautiful work anchor chart!


After that, we moved straight into our life cycle study.  Here are the books we read and the crafts that we used to display our learning:


Butterfly

We began with a review of the life cycle of a butterfly.  We read From Caterpillar to Butterfly by Deborah Heiligman and created a paper plate craft to display our learning.

Ladybug

Considering the fact that the life cycle of a ladybug is very similar to that of a butterfly, we moved next into the study of the ladybug and read A Ladybug's Life by John Himmelman.

For our craft inspiration Pinterest led us to the blog, Lucky in Learning.  Check out her craft suggestion below! 

Chicken
The chicken life cycle was our next stop in our study of life cycles.  The Magic School Bus Cracked a Yolk is a great kick off to the study of this life cycle.  For our read aloud, we studied From Egg to Chicken by Anita Ganeri.

The anchor chart:

Our hands-on craft:

Observation Journals: 

Great learning happens when students get a chance to observe and experience a life cycle in person.  In order to provide this experience for our students, we decided to order Painted Lady butterflies for our classroom.  Students kept an observation journal during the butterflies stay in our classroom. We reviewed how to make good observations and watched Brain Pop Jr's video on making observations.  Check out our anchor chart and our observation journals!

You can find a free download of the observation guide on my Teacher's Pay Teachers page!

Project Celebration

At the end of our projects, we always have a project celebration. We ended up putting on a Life Cycle Museum and this is the display of some of the great life cycle projects that we did!

We also made large life cycle sculptures of the butterfly's life cycle.  Here are two of our sculptures:

Other Educational Components:  
In addition to our life cycle displays, we also did scientific drawings of butterflies that we identified from our slides, we did a venn diagram comparing different animal life cycles and we created display boards that displayed facts and depicted each animal at different stages in its life cycle.

Discounts and Perks EVERY Teacher Should Know

So, you're like most teachers out there...broke and the availability of supplies, read alouds and technology never seems to be sufficient.  Times are tough, but you're dedicated and YOU want to make sure that your students have what they need to succeed, which is why you're willing to sacrifice what little money you have to ensure that your classroom is an inviting, engaging place.  

Thankfully, there are many stores out there that also appreciate your willingness to serve in the classroom and with a little questioning you'll find that many places provide a discount or a perk to teachers.  Here is a list of stores that I've run across within the last few years that offer discounts or rewards to teachers.  I've already listed some retail stores that offer teacher discounts in an earlier post. Check these out, along with the discounts at retail clothing stores, and enjoy saving a little green along the way.  Please note that I was in no way asked to advertise these stores.  These are stores I've personally found to provide teacher discounts. :)

JoAnn Fabric and Craft Store - 15% off every day purchases and 25% off on educator appreciation days. 

Barnes and Noble- 20% off of your in-store purchases.  The only downside is that it doesn't work for coffee. :(

Staples- 5% back in rewards, along with free online shipping and special offers.  

Office Max- Office Max offers the Max Perks program, which gives you $10 for every $75 you spend. 

Michael's - 15% off in the store with your Teacher I.D. Sometimes stores will take any document that proves you work at a school if you forget your I.D. 

A.C. Moore- 15% off in store if you have your ID.  They don't have anything advertising a discount on their website, but the stores I've been to usually offer a discount. 

Apple Store- The Apple Education Store offers a variety of discounts for schools and teachers when you find your school on their website and order through the website.  

Adobe- Software discounts are available for teachers.  The software discounts vary, depending on the product.  They are currently offering the Creative Cloud to Teachers for $20 a month.  (Photoshop, Elements, Illustrator and more...)

Scholastic- Now called the Reading Club, Scholastic offers teacher bonus points on parent orders using your access code.  Teachers can use their bonus points to purchase books from Scholastic's website.  They do a GREAT job of providing special offers to help you rack up those points!

The Container Store- They offer the "Organized Teacher Discount" which advertises discounts to be shared with teachers throughout the year.  

Finally- be sure to ASK EVERY STORE if they offer teacher discounts.  Many places will be happy to throw in a discount if you have your I.D.  There is absolutely no harm in asking! 

Happy Saving,

Katie

Our "UP" inspired Hopes and Dreams

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I have to begin my saying that I work at THE BEST school.  I truly, deeply, love my job and the team of teachers that I work with.  Working at a charter school, in my opinion (and I know there are others out there who disagree, which is fine), gives you the best of both worlds.  We get kids from all walks of life, but it makes a HUGE difference when families choose to attend your school, rather than being forced to attend.  At our charter school, we not only have an academic curriculum, but we also have a social curriculum which is called Responsive Classroom.  

Responsive Classroom has you use the first week of school to really formulate and think about what the students' hopes and dreams are for the year.  We sit down and really think about all of the things that we, individually and communally, would like to see happen for ourselves and for our classroom.  It takes a bit of stretching to help them understand what the possibilities can be, but after awhile they start to roll with the idea.  We then used our hopes and dreams to guide the discussion for what rules we would need in our classroom to make it possible for everyone (including the teacher) to reach their hope or dream for the year.  

Once the hopes and dreams are created, the purpose is to create a beautiful display that will stay up in the classroom for the ENTIRE year.  We'll reference it regularly to help us remember EXACTLY what we hope to achieve this year.  Which, led me to some detailed brainstorming, because there are FEW things I like enough to leave up in my classroom ALL YEAR LONG and that the kids would find inspiring. 

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I wanted to display our hopes and dreams.  Now, for those of you who know me...and for those of you who are just now getting to know me through this post, you'll know that I deeply love the movie "UP" from Disney Pixar.  I mean, talk about and hope and a dream...that guy had it going.  So, drawing from my love of UP, I had the students write their hopes and dreams on a balloon template, which I copied in many different colors and then we put them up in the sky with some beautiful clouds to showcase the bright colors.  However, I was left with the decision of what to put on the bottom of the balloons.  In the movie there was a house attached to the bottom, but that wasn't at all applicable.  I mean, this applied specifically to our classroom but drawing a "classroom" was tough to conceptualize in a bulletin board display.  Knowing that our hopes and dreams applied to all areas of school, though, helped me out and I ended up drawing a very tiny display of our school to put up in the room.  

Now, I need you to know that our laminator has been on the fritz and my quote "Never give UP on your dreams" has yet to be added to the display, but I've been DYING to share it with you.  So, here it is.  Drum roll please...........................................................................................................

I hope and dream that you've been inspired!  Thanks for stopping in!

Happy Dreaming,
Katie

FREEBIES on Teachers Pay Teachers

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Happy Monday!  :)

I have to start off by stating that this Monday was FAR better than last Monday.  Last week someone stole my "teacher bag" which also had some very important documents in it and it was a headache notifying all of the necessary agencies.  I mean, who takes a teacher bag full of student work, a wedding planning binder and a children's book?!?!  Needless to say the bag has not turned up. :(

In order to celebrate this Monday being much better than last week, I thought I'd share some work that I put on Teachers Pay Teachers last week.  At my school we implement Project-Based Learning and my second graders are in the middle of doing a life cycles project.  We launched the project by taking a visit to the Durham Museum of Life and Science to visit their Butterfly Conservatory.  Talk about neat!  We saw lots of butterflies, did an entire workshop on butterfly life cycles and had the chance to see some butterfly eggs.  Check out the pictures below from our trip inside the butterfly conservatory.

Now that we've launched our project we are off and away with working on learning about life cycles.  Our main focus is butterflies, while envisioning that our final product will be an entire Life Cycles Museum that we put together as a class.  They came back with some GREAT ideas after our visit to the museum and noticed details that I had glanced over that would be wonderful additions to our final product, which will unveil itself sometime in October.

Seeing as we're focused on butterflies and the fact that they are due to arrive in our room any day now, I've put together a free download on Teachers Pay Teachers that is a life cycle observation journal.  We spent today talking about how to make good observations, so we're ready to use our journals when the caterpillars arrive. There are two journal pages, a black and white cover page and a color cover page, which is shown below!

Also, to keep your week a bit more organized, I have a quick download for those of you who like to stay on top of your daily "To-Do" items.  To download you can click here or you can click on the picture.

Have a Joyful Week!
Katie

Organizing our Classroom Library

As the end of the school year starts to wrap up, I’ve been thinking more about how excited I am about summer break, but also the ways that I would like to change my room to make next year even more efficient than this past year. 

One of the areas that could use quite a bit of revamping is my classroom library.  Last year and this year I used Beth Newingham’s genre labels to organize my classroom library.  However, last year I taught fourth grade and genre labels were more appropriate.  This year I taught second grade and well, let’s just say that genre labels are nice but we need something that is a bit more practical and something that will keep my hair from producing any more stray grays…at the lovely age of below 25. 

I needed a solution that would keep my students aware of the genres that they were choosing, but would keep my library organized and my books more accessible to students because I was running into the following problems:

1.    Students were leaving the library a mess (even after I taught procedures.)

2.    Students were shuffling through genre baskets and couldn’t find the right level.

3.    Students were wasting reading time searching through baskets to find books on their level.

4.    Genre baskets were getting mixed together, despite the attempt at organization and clear labeling at the beginning of the year.

Hoping to keep my kids in tune with the genres that they are choosing, I am planning to keep my current sticker system, which gives each book a sticker color on the corner of the cover that corresponds with the genre label.  The sticker also has the Guided Reading level written on it to guide students towards choosing a “just right book.”  But, I would like to organize my books by their reading level, instead of their genre. 

Needing everything to be bright and cute, I used Microsoft Publisher to create some cute labels that I would be ecstatic to display anywhere in our rom.  You can get a free download of these labels at Teacher's Pay Teachers.  

You'll also find that I have created a set of Guided Reading Labels that I plan to use in my library to label baskets.  The set includes letters A-Z and some miscellaneous labels you can use for your baskets/bins.  I hope that you enjoy them! :)

I am also planning to stick an insert into each child’s reading folder in the fall with a genre sticker correlation chart.  I will attempt to post that on here, as well, once I have it made!

Happy Reading,

Katie