Winner!!! (a little late, I'll explain below)

The winner of the planner from April over @ A Modern Teacher is .... Amber!
Congrats, Amber! I hope you enjoy it and get a lot of use from it. Thank you, April for giving away the planner!

***Note: I originally wrote the above post last Sunday, but realized today that I never hit "Publish". At least I emailed Amber the planner before I announced the winner :P I'm sorry everyone! I was caught up in printing and binding my own copy of the planner that night.***

I've been super busy this week trying to get some summer purging done around the house so I won't feel guilty when I spend the weekend spray painting (classroom project!) I'm crossing my fingers that it turns out okay in this humidity. Speaking of humidity, I cut about 8 inches of hair off yesterday due to the pile of frizz that had taken over my head. TN humidity is awful and the bad news is that it only gets worse. :(
Who else fights humidity all summer? It has to be worse further south...

Meanwhile, my last blog post had 447 views in less than a week. That about blew my socks off when I saw that! And I'm over 75 followers! WOW! I love my followers and all of your comments! I get so excited when my email chimes telling me I have a new email on my gmail account!

*****Sorry for the rambling- my ADD has kicked into high gear tonight! LOL! I promise to have a more organized post next time :)
 Have a great Friday!

Sophia

Binder Freebie!

 My DIBELS binder is now a freebie! You can get your 8 page sample of the Binder cover and Dividers here. (when you click the link, the preview will not show up because the file is too large, but it will still download)

 If you can use this freebie, leave a comment or consider becoming a follower so you don't miss future freebies!
You can grab other great freebies from great bloggers by clicking here

Have a great Friday, everyone!

First Giveaway! and DIBELS Binder

I'm so excited to tell you about my first give away! April over at The Modern Teacher has agreed to give away one of her Teacher Planners to one of my followers! All you have to do is follow her Teachers Pay Teachers Store and her Blog, then leave a comment telling me you follow all three (my blog, her blog, and her TpT store). The winner be chosen on Saturday afternoon. Let the fun begin!

*Note this give away is over but you can still grab this planner, some coordinating labels, and notebook/binder dividers at April's TpT store*

   

 One of the planners you could win! She'll even personalize the cover for you!

Thanks, April for making this so cute and so fun!

Have you seen all of the Binder Organization going on in blogland and on Pinterest?

I'm itching to get my Binders ready and decided to start with my DIBELs binder. Our Academic Coach gave us a binder to use for administering the DIBELs assessment and I like how she had it separated by assessment types and types of progress monitoring. I decided to spruce up the binder cover and add some page dividers. Maybe having a cute binder will help make doing the assessment little more enjoyable. Here's a sneak peak at the cover and dividers.

 

Is this something you would use?  I think it would be great for any K-2 teacher who administers  DIBELs. Let me know what you think!

Sophia

My first giveaway and IKEA fun

I jumped on real quick to share about my Ikea adventure and find that I have over 50 followers now!!!!!! Doing my happy dance! I love my followers so it's time for my first giveaway! I'll be back later today to post about it (I have a few details to work out...) So check back later!


Yesterday my mom, my sister, and I all made a one day road trip to Atlanta to hit Ikea. We left at 5:00am and made it there right after the store opened at 10:00. All I can say about the experience is "WOW!" There was so much stuff to see! It's amazing what they have there and me being the teacher I am, I could only see how much potential everything had for my classroom. What teacher doesn't do that?

My first find of the day was the super cute Leaf Canopy!

I had to have 3 of them. I'm picturing these in the corner with bean bags and pillows under them. It will be an awesome reading area! Even I want to sit under there and read a good book!

My next find was a steal! How many of us have done this to use as book boxes or to hold journals?

I thought this was a simple solution one year, but I really wanted all of the boxes to match, which would be a huge project in itself by doing all of the cutting and gluing to cover the boxes.
Ikea solved that problem for me! They sell a pack of 5 magazine holders for $1.99!

So I bought 25 magazine holders for $10!!! You can't buy 25 boxes of cereal that cheap! These will get a makeover somehow...looks like I'll be hitting Pinterest for some ideas for how to make these pop:)

My splurge of the day was this beautiful table!

Right now it's sitting in it's box in the garage while I decide if I want to put it in my house or my classroom. It has a large drawer that slides out in the front so it could be a cute desk IF I decided to use it in my classroom. It's small so it wouldn't collect a mountain of paperwork on it. But it would also be soooo pretty in my bedroom as a dressing table... Decisions, decisions :)

Sophia

Planning Binder

One of things to do on my summer bucket list was to make buy a Calendar/Planner/Organizer thingy for my Planning Binder. I used a Planning Binder after reading Leslie's and Kristen's posts about their All In One Teacher Binders.
Just as I was getting really good at putting it off, I found a post about this planner that April over at A Modern Teacher created

Sample of a few of the calendar pages

Cover of April's Binder

OMG! It's exactly what I need and it matches some of my stuff already!!! Plus she will personalize the cover for free!!
This isn't just a calendar either- It has everything you will need for weekly planning including a place to record your Common Core standards for every week and month.She was a busy girl!
I bought it from her TpT store and started printing away (Thank goodness I refilled my ink on Monday!) But I couldn't stop there! I had to have the rest of my binder match (almost) the planner she had already made so I decided to use the graphics that I've been collecting and create some of the inserts for my planning binder and this is what I came up with.

(Don't know why this is so large-Sorry!)
(How do I fix this?!-It's so annoying!)



I need to add a few more pages, but first I wanted to know what you include in your planning binder. Since I'm moving up to first, I'm trying to decide if I want to include a section for grades? I keep all of my assessments for reading in my Guided Reading Binder (which will receive a make-over to match, ) so they will not live in this binder. Any suggestions?

Head over to April's Blog or her TpT store to find out more about this awesome planner!

Sophia