Monday Made It

Another Monday Made It?!

August 11, 2014 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 4 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m on a roll! I am so excited about today’s Monday Made It because I’ve got THREE!

Last week I shared with you my new take on the clip-chart — Clippin’ for Character.

I made a basket this week to store student clips for the chart, reward bracelets {that are new and freshly added to this pack!}, and hold my beloved Toto. I did my best to make my own take on Dorothy’s basket from Oz!

Students will keep their clips on the basket until they are recognized for exhibiting one of our six character traits. They will then remove their clip, place it on the chart, and take a bracelet of the trait they exhibited. This is a SUPER quick, specific way to praise kids without any cost involved! While I made the bracelets in color and blackline, I’m going to use the blackline and let my kiddos color their bracelets before wearing them.

Aren’t these clips the cutest? They’re sturdier than normal clips, and best of all, I didn’t have to decorate them myself! I bought them at Michaels for $3.99, less a 25% coupon!

All of the bracelets use the same wording and graphics as the clip-chart, which keeps everything cohesive and memorable for students.

A few examples of the bracelets outside of the basket.

My second Monday Made It is new storage for my brag tags! Most of these are from my Oz pack, though the bottom row is from the Clippin’ for Character pack. {Again, using the same graphics to keep it consistent!}

My last Monday Made It was on a total whim; I saw this faux-leather “P” and had to have it for my desk! Then I was hot-gluing ribbon to the basket above and thought, you know, this would look cool on that letter! Then I attempted to mimic my favorite KG font — can you guess which one?

Monday Made It, Teacher Tourism, and a Giveaway!

July 28, 2014 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 10 Comments

I’m linking up for the second week in a row (woohoo!) with Tara for Monday Made It! The past few days I’ve spent rather unplugged while my amazing and sweet cousin from California visits with me and my babies. It’s been SO nice to have this time with her and my boys, especially now that summer school is done. DONE. DONE! (Can you tell how excited I am?)

So — while I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on school-related things these past few days (and last week while I was tying up loose ends with summer school), I did manage to give my classroom alphabet a facelift and FINALLY bundle it as requested. It’s been a HUGE undertaking, but I’m really happy with the results.

I also made two things for my upcoming kiddos that I think are really important: a personal word dictionary and word wall. Why both? You might be asking that — and I have an answer! I use both with my kiddos because they need both. The word wall is for those high frequency words that we learn in whole and small group, words that they frequently need to spell correctly. We use our word dictionaries for those words that we do not use as frequently, but students still wish to spell correctly (and I’m so glad they want to!).

I’m planning on shrinking down several sets of my alphabet posters. {This is SUPER easy to do just from the print menu.} I plan on using them for a variety of tasks.

Some of my students will use the smaller (four to a sheet) cards for letter-recognition practice. They can play a “war” rapid-fire style game to help their letter-recognition become automatic.
Some of my students will use the smaller cards not for letter-recognition, but for word sprees! Their partner will show them a card and they will list all the words that they know the begin with that letter while their partner tallies the number of words they know. They’ll take turns and see who can list the most!
I’ll be printing the cards half-size to use as word wall headers on my cabinet, and yet another set of half-size posters to use at my small group table.
The blackline versions will be used as morning work the first week — students will decorate their own poster and it will be used in a “letter of the week” display where we’ll do whole-class word sprees, a vocabulary focus, etc.

In second grade we begin the year honing our print handwriting, and by the beginning of the 4th quarter we start the transition to cursive. I change our alphabet at the front of the room from print to print and cursive during the 3rd quarter so students are exposed to cursive before we begin to use it. I love having both displayed, as it really helps the students naturally incorporate more cursive into their daily writing.

This year I’ll be also using the cursive blacklines to help students practice their cursive — they’ll trace the laminated copies with whiteboard markers at our handwriting center.

I’ve posted all nine versions of the alphabet {primary print, cursive, and both in rainbow brights, rainbow chalkboard, or blackline} as well as three bundles — primary print, cursive, and print/cursive — on TpT. As always, they are discounted 50% for the first 24 hours, a total STEAL as each file includes a personal dictionary AND word wall for your students!

I’m also giving up copies on Facebook and Instagram, so head on over to enter to win your choice of bundle!

I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite photos from the past few days. We traveled the short distance north to Washington, D.C. to spend the day there and take my cousin to all the places we went as kids. It was a BLAST and truly makes me feel blessed to have D.C. as my backyard.

Happy Monday! And good luck to those of you that are already back-to-school!

Monday Made It – Done like a Thanksgiving Turkey!

July 21, 2014 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 55 Comments

Can you believe it? I’m actually posting a Monday Made It — on a Monday. Even while teaching summer school. I’d be in disbelief right along with you if it weren’t for the lower back pain screaming at me, “you sat WAY too long to make that darn planner!”

Let’s rewind, shall we? The summer before I started my rookie year (um, stop the world — that was 2012!) I endeavored to make a teacher planner I wanted to use. So I did. And I’m kind of embarassed, in retrospect, because um… no. It was not the best. But it worked! And I liked it, and so did other people that graciously purchased it from TpT.

No. Just no.

Last year, I updated it. Changed the fonts, made it more clean, and of course reflected the change in calendar year. Previous buyers got the update and they loved it! Wahoo. Right?

Better, but still. No.

You see, I’m an eternal perfectionist. I just cannot let something go if it’s not the best if can possibly be. This is a problem in relation to all things TpT. This is why I tend not to just throw my units up there mid-year — I can’t give them the necessary Sarah-love to get them up to my standards while spinning plates!

But it’s summer. And that means I have plenty (relatively speaking) of time to perfect, perfect, perfect.

Which gives you this:

Ahhhhh. Nice, fresh look. Clean fonts. Rainbow brights that aren’t too bright. Functional layouts. And oh yeah, 300+ pages not counting the editable PowerPoints. Yeah. I went there.

See, I can’t just have a planner with a calendar. That doesn’t work for me. I have a “book.” It’s got my calendar, my weekly overviews, my planning pages, and all of my student information, gradebooks, etc. This is my teacher bible, if you will. {Excuse the poor camera work that’s about to follow. I was trying not to wake a certain sleeping mister who fell asleep on the couch, so no light for me!}

It’s in a regular binder so that I can easily add, delete, or move pages as-needed. Like, you know, when white-out just won’t do and December needs to be reprinted. (Can anyone relate?) I have it divided into four sections: calendar, planning, important information, and data.

I probably utilize the information section even more than the calendar or planning, because it’s where I house my contact log for the very important school-to-home connection. It holds me accountable in making contact with my students and their families, and serves as an important piece of data if a child needs behavioral interventions.

And my very favorite piece of the planner is my student information page. I had a rougher version of this that I used last year and it was SO vital, especially when we began sharing students as a team for language arts. My teammates were able to photocopy this page and immediately have a snapshot of the student — from their demographics, to their likes, to other siblings at school.

All in all, this is really a Monday-through-Friday-for-three-weeks Made It. It’s been a labor of love and I am so proud to use it next year, and that I’m also able to share it with all of you. It’s on sale at TpT through this evening (20% off); you can check out some images of what else is included below:

If you’ve made it this far, I’m giving away this planner and a product of your choice from my TpT store! Enter using the Rafflecopter below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

It’s Monday, and I Made it Over!

July 29, 2013 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 2 Comments

It’s been almost a year (YIKES!) since I participated in a Monday Made It. This one is of the “makeover” variety, as I made over my blog, my Facebook page, and my logo for my TPT store. It took a lot of staring at my computer screen between nursing sessions, but I finished it (and I think it looks pretty neato, if I do say so myself).

Between this massive overhaul and my kiddos, you’d think I was pretty well covered on the “exhausted and busy” scale. NOPE! Come on, you know me! I’m not satisfied unless I’m pulling all-nighters and looking like I haven’t slept in years.

Ah, yes, 200+ pages of differentiated K-2 math goodness! This is something I’d been making for myself since before I went on maternity leave because I was so frustrated with how my math routines and calendar time went this year — so I decided to add a few more options and offer it up for other teachers to utilize. I’m almost finished editing it and proof-reading it (thank you to the fabulous ladies from my Facebook page that offered their time!), and will write my MEGA post in a few days on how I’m planning to beef it up and make the most of my math meeting time this year.

If you’d like to win a “pre-order” of this mammoth resource, leave me a comment with your best tip for teaching all those little math concepts that seem to slip through the cracks (you know the ones — they aren’t beefy enough for a whole unit, but important enough that you have to “hit” them all year long). I’ll choose a winner Friday morning!

I did make it on Monday…

August 15, 2012 by Sarah Plum(itallo) 5 Comments

I’m almost two days late. But that’s okay. We’ll pretend that I indeed posted this Monday morning.

I fully intended to post a few more items on my TPT store during the Back to School sale, but that never happened. My to-do list ran away from me, my nearly three year old decided that he didn’t need to listen to Mommy anymore, and I got a little carried away. With this.

I started out with the plan to make my “pick me” bucket. I thought that since my kiddos are my “lollipop guild” and lollipops are featured on my student data binder I should do lollipops. So I made the labels, and started to affix them to my trusty popsicle sticks.

I had this nagging feeling. Come on. You know you want to go all out.

My car drove itself to AC Moore. My debit card purchased cellophane, cookie sticks, and ribbon. And then my hands, independent of my brain, made these:

Your eyes aren’t seeing things. Those are lollipop numbers wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon. Yes. I went there.

The metal pot is an antique, and unbreakable. It reminds me of something you might see in Dorothy’s house, which is why I chose it over a plastic pot from Walmart (which I might’ve hot-glued ribbon and a label to before I changed my mind). I’m on the fence about a label. What do you think?

As a mea-culpa for not posting anything new so you could enjoy 28% savings, I’ve uploaded the numbers in three sizes (4″, 3″, and 1.5″ diameter) to my TPT store. You can grab them by clicking on the image below — I hope you find them useful!

I’ll be back tomorrow night to share the first progress pictures of my classroom — I’m spending the whole day there tomorrow cleaning it out and arranging it (once or twice or five times) before I start decorating. Wish me luck… and not clumsiness!