I {glittery} heart my LCD Projector!

I don't have an interactive whiteboard. Not yet. 

Buuuuuuut I DO have an LCD projector mounted above my whiteboard!

Lemme tell ya, I LOVE this thing! When the color wheel broke last year (after an earthquake - who knew we had earthquakes in NC?) and it was flashing too much to use it (literally my kids were getting headaches from the colors flashing) I didn't know what to do without it!

• We love our online timers, that many others have blogged about, like here.
• We love to use YouTube to introduce new / review old skills.
• We love to watch DiscoveryEd videos after we've packed up and are waiting for buses to be called.
• We love to use some things from SmartExchange or online games like on cookie.com, and we just use the mouse instead of an interactive whiteboard.
• We love to project the graphic organizers we are about to use and practice filling them in together on the whiteboard.

What I can't WAIT to try next year is this super fun thing:

The way Bouncy Balls is designed, it automatically uses a mouse click to send all the balls flying into the air. They come back down again, but they are all jumbled up. There is a button in the top left of the screen to activate your microphone. WHAT?!

When your microphone is activated, the balls can be sent flying by NOISE. Project this, activate microphone, and I bet we will work quietly!

What's that you say? Kids will want to see the balls go flying, and thus will make lots of noise? Hmmm. Must think of a way to manage that.

Here's my game plan, please comment with what you would do:

When introducing Bouncy Balls, we will have 10 seconds to make whatever noise we want and send them flying! Once all the balls have settled onto the ground, we will practice being quiet enough to not disturb them.

Each subsequent time we use Bouncy Balls, we will have 5 seconds to send the balls sky high. After that 5 seconds, we will earn a clip down or a Mighty Oh No for any time that the balls go flying too high during a quiet working time.

"Mighty Oh No"s are part of Whole Brain Teaching's Scoreboard practice. For more FREE information, visit WholeBrainTeaching.com.

Do you have an LCD projector in your classroom? (Or an interactive whiteboard?)

What's your favorite tool?

Back to School TO DO

This is SO me right now! 

I just finished creating and printing my word wall letters (this is gonna be my cutest one yet!)

{polka dots and chevron by Dreamlike Magic}

I love that my vowels are hot pink and my consonants are light green. I know, what happened to green and blue, right? Well this will all be on a blue background thanks to Walmart's super cheap twin sheets. Staple a sheet to the wall, add some border, and you've got another bulletin board!

Then I printed this super cutie:

{The Teacher Wife}

...still figuring out where it will go.

Laminated? Framed? Plastered on each and every kid's desk and tattooed on my forehead?

In other news...

I had a HUGE moment of panic last night when I looked at a calendar. I know, right? Where did all of my summer go? I fly out SUPER early Wednesday morning to go visit the fam for a week. This will be the longest time that my sweet hubby and I have spent apart since we got married 3 years ago! Maybe that sounds sappy to you, but I love that boy :)

I'll get back next Wednesday, then I start a workshop the following Mon-Thurs. After that, I'm back in my classroom the next Monday, non-stop till school starts!

My summer vacay (at home) only has 5 days left!

Soooo... what's left on my to-do list? (And what can I get done on the plane?)

A Get-to-know-the-teacher Scavenger Hunt for the first week of school. 

Some examples for a writing center

An All About Mrs. Newman book

(Hopefully my sweet mom can help me with this while I'm home!)

A Check-Out board

...and last but not least...

Sweet table skirts and curtains

(Hoping mom might be all about this too!)

Too ambitious? PROBABLY! What's left on your back-to-school to-do list?

Hooray! Classroom Pretty

A couple weeks ago I started thinking about ways to make my classroom PRETTY this year in ways that wouldn't interfere with the function. I considered draping fabric between ceiling tiles:

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... but decided that would be a LOT of fabric, and a lot of dust in my face as I tried to maneuver the fabric. I thought about a couple other things, but they didn't have quite the dramatic impact I was going for. 

Enter Paper Lanterns:

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BONUS! Paper lanterns aren't too expensive! I'm doing my classroom in blues and greens (with some pops of pink, because I LOVE pink) so I went in search, internet search, of paper lanterns. Did you know you could buy those things in just about ANY color you can imagine?! Hooray!!!

I looked at two different websites, Luna Bazaar and Paper Lantern Store. They are almost identical, and for no particular reason, I ended up ordering from PLS. No matter which site you use, there are SO many styles and sizes of lanterns, so you can really do whatever you want with these lanterns! 

I ended up ordering 3 green and 3 "turquoise" (I call it blue)lanterns at 12" tall, and then they had these packs of 10 lanterns, 4" tall, for super cheap. See?

All told it cost me $26.13 (incl. shipping) for 26 lanterns!

I can't wait to hang these babies up. The big ones will go over the kid's tables, and somehow they'll have the table numbers on them. The small ones will hang over the classroom library at different heights to create a kind of cloud of color over there. I can't wait to get in my classroom, hang them up, and show y'all some pictures! 

What are you doing to decorate your classroom this year? Do you have a theme or color scheme?

P.S.: After searching online, and a home improvement store, and a craft store, I finally found a good way to organize my dollar store foam letter tiles! Each tray holds one set of capital letters and one set of lowercase. The trays were $2 at Walmart. Can't beat that price! Wish I'd gone there first, but our nearest Walmart is a 30+ minute drive. Good thing I have one near school! 

Potty! Potty!

So, I know it's not new, but I just read this old post over at The Teacher Wife and it reminded me of how unbelievably MUCH my kiddos last year just "had" to go to the bathroom!

I had 8 girls and 14 boys. If one boy had to go, they ALL had to go. The one or two boys that didn't go then, inevitably had to go 5 minutes later!

In my classroom, each student had a library pocket on their cubby. This is where they kept their punch card (more on this later) and their 3 popsicle sticks. Each stick had that student's number on it, so we knew where it went back at the end of the day.

Students were required to use the restroom as SOON as they finished unpacking and before they started morning work. We also took a whole-class bathroom break right before lunch (and washed our hands). These two counted as "freebies".

Any other time a student needed to use the restroom, they had to give me a popsicle stick. I kept a basket by the door where students turned in sticks. Again, each kiddo had 3 sticks. This is a total of 5, count 'em, FIVE trips to the bathroom! If they had to go again and didn't have a stick, they could go, but they had to clip down.

A bummer: students are not allowed to go ANYwhere without a buddy. Many times my boys would go with a buddy, then get back, and have to go themselves. Why couldn't you just go when you were there a minute ago?!

Speaking of bathrooms and washing hands:

I love it!!!

Letter tiles - CHEAP!

Remember I showed you my Dollar Tree finds the other day?

Well I wanted to tell you a little more about the letter tiles I scored! I recently bought some letter tiles from Lakeshore, but I was a little disappointed at what I got for what I paid and I need to send them back. It was an impulse buy, and I'm never good at that.

However, I got 4 sets of alphabet tiles for a third the price at Dollar Tree! I bought two capital and two lowercase packs. I will keep them at the word work center. Since they are foam, they are also thin enough to put in a pocket chart - I have a couple tabletop pocket charts I snagged at the dollar spot last summer.

Each package has two foam sheets, and the letters are perforated. I was excited and opened them up right away to tear the letters apart... I was a little too excited:

 ...but truly this is EASY to do. DO NOT TEAR THESE APART! After ripping this one, I used scissors to cut along the perforated lines. Honestly, each set has a bajillion e's so we'll be fine without this one.

I was a little bummed when I saw this a:

but this is the only letter that was messed up out of 4 packages. Pretty good for $4!

I can't wait to get something like this to store and organize the letters:

Do you have letter tiles in your classroom? What do your kiddos like to use them for?

Data, Data, Everywhere! (freebie)

Do you use data in your class?

The word "data" can often instill fear in a teacher's heart; data meetings, data-driven instruction, assessments! I think this is because so often we forget that what we instinctively know about our students IS data, it's just not a number on a graph or a chart.

That's not the "data" that I'm talking about.

I've been seeing more and more about class data walls and a little bit about student data notebooks as I surf pin plan for the coming year. I had a college professor that was CRAZY for these things, but we all just thought he was plain crazy. I mean who has time for that?

I have spent a couple weeks (on and off, I mean, I've got to give the TV my full attention some time!) putting together a word doc of what I might want in a data folder next year.

Download the freebie here and then PLEASE, please, PLEASE let me know what you think!

I would love to hear from some teachers that have done this before. Do you have your students track their progress? How does it work in your classroom?

Dollar Tree DEALS!

Hit up the gym last night (I'm making getting fit my summer "job") and unfortunately for my wallet and my husband, Dollar Tree is NEXT DOOR to the gym. How perfect!

I told myself I was just going in to look, not expecting back to school stuff to already be out. Well, it was, and I spent $30! Wanna see what I scored?

Clockwise from top left:

• Two puzzles in the frame to make this from TeacherTipster.com
• A clipboard to fancy up a la pinterest
• Two mini dry erase boards - each day of the week I will put one spelling word on each, with the magnet letters scrambled up. Two words per day for five days will be all 10 spelling words throughout the week! (Not my original idea...)
• Die cut letters in a beautiful turqoise that will go SO well with my classroom theme. 
• 3D plastic stickers in an ocean theme - I'm not big on stickers but I am beginning to hoard them in preparation for using these awesome Friday journals.
• A Lei to wear during Guided Reading - when I wear the lei, kiddos can't interrupt me.
• Photo albums (4x6) to put kiddos pictures and names in like this
• Library pockets - I had such a hard time finding these last year so I seriously bought 9 packs of 10 - I have enough for at least three years. My name is Mrs. Newman, and I am a hoarder.
• Money Matching game - no specific purpose for these yet but I love to use flashcards in the hall during bathroom breaks
• Cardstock coins (I bought these last year but I can't find them! aaah!) to make posters like these AMAZING ones
• A pizza pan to fancy up a la pinterest (but I bought a round one instead)
• Foam letter tiles (I bought two yellow capital sets and two blue lowercase sets.) More on these below.

I can't wait to get started on my classroom - but I can't get in until August 13th. For now, I'll just have to settle for doing these little projects at home!

Have you found any good deals yet?