I've been an extremely bad blogger recently... But, I have some good reasons.
First, I graduated and was out of town for my graduation over the weekend. Woo hoo! I have my Master's. Thanks mom and dad for everything you've done to help me and encourage me to follow my dreams!
Next, I'm going to link up with Tara over at 4th Grade Frolics for her May Monday Made It.
I have spent some time crafting with my Cricut. Since I still don't have any leads on jobs for next year, I have been working on some things that I can use in any grade level. I decided that I will use blue, green, and purple as my color scheme for my classroom. I have also decided that I'm digging chevron prints at the moment. So why not combine the chevron with stripes, polka dots, and stripes in my color scheme for classroom decorations?
So, first I made these little alphabet signs as my word wall headers. We'll see how they look once they are in a classroom and on a word wall. I may have to change them after the school year starts.
Next, I made some calendar headers using the Cricut. I absolutely love these! I can't wait to see these with a solid black calendar and with black and white calendar numbers.
The last thing I made for my classroom is this Boggle poster. I still need to get this laminated. I plan on putting letters on each of the chevron papers for my class to use boggle as an activity during Daily 5 - word work.
I'm so excited to keep creating things for my future classroom. I just hope that I get a job and have time to decorate before school starts/open house night. Good thing my sister owes me from all the help I've given her in the past five years! She'll surely be by my side cleaning and decorating so my room is ready in time :)
Do you have a classroom library? Do you want to know how to get "free" books to help build a classroom library? Let me tell you my secret. I have just over 800 books that I maybe have spent $200 for in the past 3 years. Everything else I have gotten through a volunteer program. Scholastic holds customer appreciation sales two times a year throughout the US. At these sales, many of the books that they bring to school book fairs can be found for 50% off. Some books can be found for 25% off, and others are marked for one or two dollars. I personally have attended the Louisville, KY and West Chester, OH sales. I know that there are sales in cities across the country though. Anyway, if you want to get "free" books, you just need to sign up to volunteer at one of these sales. For each volunteer hour, you get a $10 voucher to spend at the sale. So, essentially you get $20 worth of books for each volunteer hour since most of the books are at least 50% off. Pretty cool, right? Take a look at the picture below - I got all 33 of these books for working for 9 hours at the sale. This was time that I worked on grading papers for my sister, surfing the internet on my phone, and talking to my friend who was also volunteering. It can be boring at times, but I think it is well worth the time if you don't have a lot of money to use to supply your own classroom books. So gather some friends and family to go volunteer with you - they can give their vouchers to you to use for classroom books and supplies. You can go to this website to check out the nearest sale to you http://www.scholastic.com/bookfairs/events/warehouse/. This site is updated in mid-late October and mid-late March for the December and May sales respectively. To volunteer, you register for the sale and click the option that you'd like to volunteer. The person in charge of the sale will then contact you about scheduling if they need more volunteers still. In my experience, the earlier you get signed up, the better chance of volunteering at the sale.
I'm hoping to have some more items on TpT by the end of the week. I'm thinking a third grade ELA language packet that is common core aligned, the fourth grade math common core assessments. I also have inspiration for some other documents, but I'm still thinking those through.
Have a great rest of the week!
-Sami
