Monday Made LOTS OF It!

Yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaa! Another successful Monday Made It!!

PROJECT #1
One of my teacher buddies even came over this weekend and we had a Pinterest day! So much fun! This definitely needs to happen again in the future! Not only were we able to talk and catch up, but we were productive as well! She made a teacher toolbox and I made some of the things below. We drank lots of coffee and I made this for lunch.

 Buffalo Chicken Quinoa Mac and Cheese

Can we just talk about how awesome it was? Even my boyfriend who hates quinoa loved it! Super easy, super good, and definitely to be made again!

On to my made its!!

PROJECT #2
First up, birthday balloons! Love these ideas I saw popping up all over! I found the balloon at Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits. She used pixie sticks, so her balloons were very large! I made mine a little smaller and added "Hip Hip Hooray It's your Birthday today!" I found the straws 6 for one dollar at Dollar Tree. LOVE that place!!

PROJECT #3
This is my third year using Whole Brain Teaching. I love these little cards that Stephanie at 3rd Grade Thoughts made. Cannot wait to post these up this year! I printed and laminated them.

PROJECT #4
I mentioned buying these from Kristen at Ladybug's Teacher Files last week. Well... here they are! All printed, cut out, and laminated! My plan is to put magnets on the back and stick them to my whiteboard.

PROJECT #5
So this is absolutely my biggest challenge so far. This was my first year teaching with math stations as one of my rotations. (You can read more about how I do math workshop here!!) I have accumulated so many games, and definitely had storage issues with them. My summer project is to get these organized before school starts in a few weeks.

 Just this week I pulled out all the games and organized them into piles sorted by math concept.

In addition to sorting them, I made sure that each game was placed into a large ziploc bag. Then I wrote the name of the game on the front. This game below has multiple copies so it's much easier for me to keep them all in one bag.

 Within each bag is each indivisual game which I usually keep in a page protector. These have proved to be AWESOME this year! I can stick the gameboards, pieces, cards, EVERYTHING in one easy to hold case. Best of all it's cheap! Some of my games need dry erase markers, and these page protectors can easily be written on and erased! Best of all, you don't need to laminate game boards anymore! This has saved me lots of time last year.

On the back of some of my game bags I have written materials that are needed. I don't keep dice and other game pieces with every game because I don't have enough. By writing what the game needs on the back, I'm hoping that it will be easy to play right away and will help me be better prepared. I'll try anything if it cuts down on prep time.

My next project will be turning all the sterilite drawers I have at school into something like what Mrs. Bond did in her room:

But instead of months, they'll have my different math concepts with all the stations not being used by my students, housed and organized inside! Get ready to see this next week!

PROJECT #6
Now that I have my math stations organized, next up was organizing all of my math worksheets, master copies, and projects. Last year I kept them in file folders, and I was horrible at returning the papers to the correct folder. For some reason filing just did NOT work for me. I've decided to use binders this year.

 Just like my math stations, I am creating binders based on math concepts. So far I have:

• Measurement
• Place Value/Patterns
• Money
• Probability/Graphing & Data
• Fractions
• Addition/Subtraction (which I divided up into single digit, double digit, and triple digit using divider tabs)
• Multiplication/Division
• Geometry

Download them HERE for FREE if you are interested in them! :)

Here's a peek inside my Measurement binder (I plan on using dividers to make sections for customary, metric, area/perimeter, time, temperature, weight, and liquids:

 I have my master copies that I used during my Current Events or Team Meeting stations.

 I also kept some of my student's work for some of the projects we completed. This was one of my favorites! Students were given 6-8 strips of paper of various lengths. They had to measure each of them, then turn it into a picture. This student created an alligator that could even open its mouth when you pulled up on the orange strip!! So creative! Then the students added up ALL of the strips to get a final total and named their creation! I'll have to highlight some of my favorite math projects before school starts!

 I also used page protectors to house cards, leftover project pieces, manipulatives, specific team meeting or minilesson games, etc. Anything that couldn't be hole punched and that was not specifically a math station.

And then more master copies. It's going to be so much easier to put them back in this binder rather than in a folder!!

PROJECT #7
And now for my BIG HOME PROJECT REVEAL!!!!!!

DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNN

Remember my dining room wall from last week?

Well we finally finished the taping, and began painting last week. One thing we did once the tape was on, was paint white over the edges of the paint. We have a textured wall and we wanted to make sure when we painted our stripes, it wasn't going to bleed under the painter's tape.

 Well after we painted the grey stripes, we found out the orange we wanted to use wouldn't cover the green paint that was originally on the wall (even though the orange paint had primer too! Lesson learned, when painting with orange, grab a can of primer too no matter what!) Soooo a quick trip to Lowe's and we snagged some primer and had the lady add a little orange tint to it. Although in the picture it looks pink.

Cute story- the boyfriend commented how the picture above would look cute in a little girl's room because of the pinkish and grey colors. Cue "AWWWWWWWWWW" moment!

Anyway, 2 hours later we were able to paint on the orange.

And did the peeling of the paint later that night.....

AND TADA!!!!!! We are super proud! Those orange flowers above were the inspiration for the orange colors! :)

They stripes look really straight and I am soooo glad we put small white lines in between the colored ones. Some of the paint bled under the tape though, so we have some touching up still to do. You can't tell from far away, but to be honest, for a first attempt I'm impressed!! Definitely a loooooong process, but the results in the end were absolutely worth it!