Meeting Staff, Ron Clark, and Monday Made Its!

It's been a busy week and things aren't going to slow down any time soon as my summer free time starts to wind down at far too fast a pace. On Saturday my principal invited me and the rest of my school staff to her house for a get together. We're all basically new at our school this year (only about 8 teachers stayed from last year) and my principal thought it would be nice for everyone to meet each other before this week since about 20 of us are attending a Differentiated Instruction conference this week together. We had a great night at the get together. We all brought a different dish and I have to say I am super excited about working with the rest of the teachers at my school. While we were there we worked on some collaborative art projects that we'll be putting into our teacher's lounge. AND we also got our tax exempt forms for when we shop for work as well as our reimbursement forms (our school will reimburse each teacher for $200 worth of purchased). My principal also told us that while our official Teacher Report Date is August 14th, we can start setting up our classrooms on August 1st (which is only 16 days away, hence my starting to go into panic mode about getting everything done in time).

Today is the first day of the Differentiated Instruction Conference I'm attending. The kick off event is at 5:00 and it is the conference keynote speech. The speaker is Ron Clark and afterwards he's doing a book signing. I'm excited about it and have both of his books, so I'm hoping to get him to sign them after the event tonight. I'll blog about each day of the conference and share all the awesome info and ideas I get while I'm there.

Now for my....

My first made it is: Pick Sticks Container. Here is how it turned out...

Sorry that the last picture came out a little fuzzy... I blame my iPhone. To make my pick stick container all I needed to get was the paper mache container and the popsicle sticks (I bought the jumbo sized ones so they would stick out of the container enough). I already had the rick rack and paint at home. All I did was sketch out the half circles on the top and then used an Xacto knife to cut them out (go slow so you don't cut yourself)... this way I can separate the sticks that I've already picked from the ones I can still choose from. I also hot glued to top of the container to the base. All I have to do now is just write my student's names on them once I get my class roster.

My second made it is my Unsharpened Pencils Container....

I also made this using one of those paper mache containers...it's just a smaller one than my Pick Sticks one. I didn't make one for my sharpened pencils because I plan on ordering this from Oriental Trading next week...

It's a set of 144 pencils and they come in that nifty dispenser. My plan is to keep sharpened pencils in this and the unsharpened ones in the container I made. 

My third made it is my Where Are We board. I plan on keeping it hung up next to the door to my classroom so if specialists, parents or other staff need to know where my students are at any given time, they'll know. A while back, I made these Where Are We cards (I just realized I still need to make one for Spanish) that go with the board (I made these using graphics from My Cute Graphics)...

And here is the board I made....

As a note...magnets + craft glue + laminated card stock do not work well together. The magnets fell right off the cards even once the glue dried so I used velcro dots I had instead (I just put it on top of the magnet on the board and in place of the magnets on the cards).  Here is what the board looks like with one of the cards on it...

So those are my Monday Made It's for this week. Make sure you stop by 4th Grade Frolics and check out all the other MMIs too! I'm off to go figure out what I'm wearing to the conference this week...