It Only Took Till July...

Hello, my friends!
I welcomed myself back what feels like ages ago, but here I finally am!
The moment school got out, I jetted off to vacation and left behind all of my classroom thoughts! While all sorts of things happened over the course of vacation and the time following, I have finally found my brain again. I know you're all very excited!

I have not yet begun all of the crafting that summer will entail. It is coming, but for the moment I am fairly preoccupied with the fluffy rug that came home with me a few weeks ago:

I don't quite trust Miss Puppy-Head enough for me to bust out the paint or the glue gun yet. For now, I thought I would chat to you about my technology experience this year. It was sort of a doozy for me.

Back in August, I was asked to be a technology representative for our school site. This job entailed attending meetings and discussing district tech needs and the future of this crazy world we've created. Alongside of that job, I became the go-to on our school site for basic troubleshooting needs. Ironically, much of the tech that I was being asked to help with was not even installed in my classroom! But everything changed during the winter with the arrival of....a whole cart of ChromeBooks!

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the teeny tiny lappy computer that runs primarily as an internet delivery system. 

The device runs Google Chrome and is incredibly simple to use...and I suddenly had 36 of them in my classroom! 

Chromebooks offer the option for users to log in as a "guest," (which we utilized in our upper grades more when time was of the essence) but the students were all given individualized Google accounts that had the social components deactivated. This meant that we could create digital portfolios using Google Drive! We could build presentations using Google Sheets! I could assess my class using Google Forms! We could make spreadsheets about the school's track team using Google Spreadsheets!...oh, that was just me.

Suddenly, amazing doors were open to me! I had always been a Safari user, so these devices gave me the motivation to begin playing with the Chrome Browser and research ways to use it in my class. I can't tell you how exciting it was to have the opportunity to play with these things for a couple of months before having to share!

The thing that was the easiest to play with and is so nice to incorporate even without personal computers in your classroom was KidBlog. This website gives classrooms the opportunity to build a blogging community and teach students internet rules and etiquette. A usual morning in my room would include the assigning of a high-interest informational article (lengths varied) and giving a free response question on the blog. The students were always given the opportunity to positively comment on each others' writing; however, in the early stages of third graders having computers...typing skills are minimal and responses generally took a very long time.

I would encourage you to try out the site. It was very easy to set up and it offers a certain level of security. Students can only enter your blog with a specific password to your specific blog URL. That limits their ability to have things widely read across the wide, dark interwebz. 

Cosmetically, KidBlog has some work to be done, but the fidelity of the idea is there. 

Random Summer Mash-Up

My dear friend, Becky, over at Musings From the Foreign Teacher has been putting me to shame....
Don't worry, I'm busily planning my trip to visit her as we speak...rather than blogging...or really doing much of anything.

School got out ages ago, and I have spent a lot of time looking at the file box that is lingering in the back of my car waiting to be sorted into a lovely orange binder that will spend lots of bonding time with the other binders I made last summer. However, the amount of work associated with that project has left me with little motivation to do it, and lots of motivation to plan for Boyfriend's and my trip to London.

Similarly, I have been trying to get back on the running bandwagon ever since I got back from visiting a friend in Scotland over spring break. So my Doctor Who socks and I have been spending a lot of miles together on the treadmill.

I've also avoided work by doing mindless work! 

This year, our district started the process of adding in days that had been previously removed due to budget issues. For the moment, this consisted of us teachers coming in and putting in two full days after the kiddos had left the building. When all was said and done, I really enjoyed this process. In the past, we have had a deadline of 4pm on the last day of school to be over and done and closed up for the summer. With all of that extra time this year, I could have procrastinated a lot more! 

But instead of procrastinating, I had the joy of moving my classroom across the hallway and into a much more spacious/storage-ready center room. Having lived as a crazy minimalist (or as much as a teacher can) for the last two years, I found that I have more empty cabinets in this new room than I do filled ones!

Much to my OCD's dismay, I wasn't able to completely settle in or get totally unpacked. There wasn't much of a point. All of the desk-y things needed to be stowed away no matter what, so a lot of my "unpacking" consisted of shoving things into a file cabinet and locking it.

This is why there are no pictures yet.

Instead, I slowly set to work trying to figure out what I wanted to do in order to semi-cover the windows that connected me to the classrooms of six other teachers. Originally, I had wanted to put cute contact paper up on said windows to create bulletin board spaces that separated my room from the next (there are two windows and a door for each of the six rooms)...however "cute" and "contact paper" didn't wind up working together in the merry land of the interwebz, so I started over.

It came to me at a one year old's birthday party....bunting flags. 

I love them. They're adorable. They can suit any space. They're easy!

I like it! So, since I'm being super frugal and going to Michael's just about every week; I popped over there and grabbed some books filled with cute scrapbook paper.

If this blog has done anything, it has brought to light my tendency to go overboard...having purchased my scrapbook paper, I fell in love with two different sets of color combos. (i.e. two different forms of orange/pink/teal...but mostly orange...) Being me, I set up to cut out enough flags to re-do my windows a few times this year.

Start by making a triangle template out of cardboard.

The best decision I made for efficiency purposes was to fold the 12"x12" scrapbook page in half and therefore got 6 total triangles (based on the size of my template) out of each page.

I pulled out my trusty cutting board, traced a billion triangles, and used my slide cutter to cut them all out.

Now I have an over-achiever amount of triangles.

This was the time that I high-tailed it over to Lakeshore to laminate all of the crazy triangles...because, go big or go home. Plus, the ladies at Lakeshore always like the ridiculous projects that you laminate at their big laminator, right?

So this is the projected final product. I am currently in debate over whether I want to use the orange yarn that I have here (out of cheapness) or to get plain white ribbon...

Currently though, I have been getting majorly distracted by lame things like Candy Crush Saga and Facebook and still have a bunch of triangles to cut out of the big lamination sheets. Doesn't help that blogs like Skinny Runner keep pulling me away from actual teaching productivity with their shiny awesomeness.

I am looking to figure out how to add PDFs of some of the adorable chevron printed Daily 5 pages I've been making on here...while it feels like I am being counterproductive, I am actually doing a good amount of reading/making things dealing with that system. I'll keep doing my homework and update as I go!

And also, mostly because I need to catch up to Becky, I will work to blog tomorrow and answer all of the things she assigned to me with the Leibster Award.

More on that tomorrow!

For now, here's a cute puppy:

Pinterest Addict

Alright, I'll admit it:

I'm addicted to teaching blogs and pinterest.

Big time.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a lot of rearranging that I would love to be doing in my classroom, but my keys are turned in and locked away. Sigh.

As I've mentioned a million times before, I love, love, love Ladybug's Teacher Files; however, she is on vacation right about now. Her trip is perfectly timed with my mental obsession about my classroom reorganization...and now I am pouring over the Clutter Free Classroom !

The post that is linked is what has inspired a whole lot of online shopping: using sheets as bulletin board backgrounds.

Genius.

Ages ago, a former teacher of mine recommended using fabric to cover boards. While I also agreed that this was a fantastic idea, my OCD kicked in and I could see crooked edges...which would drive me nuts. So, I just finished a date with AnnasLinens.com that resulted in three brown sheets (to match my dots on chocolate colors) for $20! I shall report the results once I have returned to the land of the classroom.

Otherwise, I just finished today's Pinterest project of the day, and it worked out perfectly! With that Pinterest obsession I mentioned, I've seen a whole lot of pins where cheap frames are used to display lesson objectives. Seemed easy enough!

Math Teacher Friend and I took a trip to the Dollar Tree and Michael's today to buy scrapbook paper and frames.

Michael's was having a 50% off sale on their scrapbook paper (plus the teacher discount), so I got very adorable paper to frame! (Sadly no polka dots, but awesome orange patterns.)

After dismantling the frame, I traced the cardboard insert so the size would be marked properly.

In order to have sharp lines, and create enough layers so things wouldn't slip around, I opted to fold along my pencil lines rather than cut. It worked out really well, since the $1 frames needed a little extra help to make everything fit nicely.

And look! Cute little dry erase board! Perfect for writing eye-catching lesson objectives on and sticking on the white board! I do anticipate using black markers when they're actually displayed; however, blue is all I had on me.

Now all that is left is to figure out a nice configuration and to get them onto the white board! I'm also tossing some pink and blue in with my orange this year (again, to match the dots and chocolate), so I made sure to make the "objectives" sign in a different color.

And again, I leave you with the tease of my interactive notebooking research. I've been in the trenches looking, but I have not yet convinced myself that I want to implement it into my math program. We shall see!