Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Blog Makeover

My blog got a makeover! I love it! It is crisp and clean. It was designed by Designer Blogs and I had a great experience with them. Highly recommend them!
Tomorrow is Halloween and the kids are already cuckoo for cocoa puffs. I am always so happy to see that my 6th graders are still excited to dress up and go trick or treating. We have a spooky lab experiment we are doing tomorrow so hopefully that will keep them occupied and we will have organized chaos. I am thankful we have a half day tomorrow so we won't have to deal with the candy sugar rush after lunch! Happy Halloween everyone!


Tuesday, October 23, 2012

To blog or not to blog?

I have been blogging a little over a year now and am feeling a little plateaued. I love this wee little blog and have loved reading what everyone else has put out into cyber space. I feel like my teaching and instruction has improved 200% and have learned invaluable information about creating documents and feel much more advanced technology wise. 
There are some downsides to this though...
I feel like I have so few followers compared to other people who have been blogging for as long as me. Granted, this is mostly my fault because I don't put in enough time for consistent posts. I tried to create a linky party and that was a giant disaster; no one entered! Ugh, that made me feel like a loser.


Lately, no one has commented on the last few posts I have written. I am honestly not even sure if anyone is reading this blog anymore. Sorry for the pity party... I guess I need some advice on how to make this more successful. I don't want to be the one who starts and then stops a blog because no one wanted to read it! Any advice would be much appreciated!

Monday, October 22, 2012

Red Ribbon Week

Happy Monday!
Just a quick little post today. We have a whole lot going on this week! It's Red Ribbon Week. I had seen this bulletin board idea on Pinterest {SOURCE} and knew instantly that this is exactly what I wanted to do on our bulletin board in our classrooms.
I asked our crafty classroom mom helper (who is amazing!) to duplicate it and it is AWESOME!


The "songs" on the iPod are the different days for the week and the theme of the week "Follow Your Dreams, Stay Clean" is the highlighted yellow.  Is it bad that I want to leave it up all year?

I wanted to share a freebie with y'all to start off the week right! I love Scholastic book club orders and I have made a little somethin' somethin' for your classroom to track when the orders are due.  I have downloaded it onto Vistaprint as a small car magnet, but you could also print and laminate it/put it in a plastic sleeve. Use a dry erase marker to tick down the days. Click the picture to download the PDF. 


Enjoy! Leave some comment love if you download please!

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Classroom Job Signs

Happy Wednesday!
A few weeks ago I posted about my classroom job bulletin board {HERE}.  I am posting those here so that you all can use them in your classroom.


I used the font Coffeeshoppe Espresso by Sweet Shoppe Designs. If you don't have that font it won't come through the same. Of course you can use any cute font that you like. There are some blank templates at the end so that you can add your own. I tried to think of all the different jobs I have seen in the past, but I am sure I am missing some. Enjoy!

Freebie:  Classroom Jobs ~ PowerPoint

Monday, October 8, 2012

Snow White Experiment

I'm on fall break! Woohoo! This is the first year that my district has done fall break, and I have to say it's not shabby. I'm not hating the fact that I am on my couch with a pumpkin spice latte doing laundry while blog stalking.  :)

This past week, my students had just wrapped up their science processes unit so I decided to do a fun project to asses and give our unit some closure.

Have you ever seen this book? I bought it on Amazon and love it!


It takes a handful of popular fairy tales and gives you ideas for experiments for each one. Along with each experiment comes a handout for the students to complete and an explanation. It's fabulous!

I decided to do the Snow White experiment. In the fairy tale, Snow White lays in a glass coffin for years and is as pretty as a peach the whole time while being dead as a doornail. So I asked my students, what do you think would happen if we put an organic item in a sealed container?  My students made hypothesis and stated evidence to back it.  I then broke the students up into groups and each group mushed up a banana and put that into one bottle, broke up a piece of celery into another bottle, and then put some leaves in a third bottle (fruit, vegetable, and plant). You then put a balloon over the top of the water bottle and seal with tape. As the fruit rots, the balloon will collect the gases that the rotting food and bacteria give off.

After fall break, we are going to go back and check out our experiments. Ew. I am anticipating some disgusting outcomes especially from the banana a week old, bleh. I'll take some pictures, I'm sure you can't wait to look at them!  Have a good week!