My First Freebie

I have been searching for a classroom library label set for quite some time now. I never found one that exactly fit my collection of books. It never had the right categories, or Canadian spelling. So I decided to create my own. I figured I would offer it as a freebie to anyone else who could use it. If there is interest, I can change the spelling of favourite to the American version. Just leave a comment below. All of the graphics for this freebie come from The 3am Teacher.

She has lots of easy frames to start creating. I will be posting the pdf document to Google Docs. Eventually I hope to open a shop at TPT and I will add it there as well. Just click on the picture to grab the labels.

I hope that you enjoy this freebie. Thanks for reading and following,



First Day Jitters Link up

Well I survived our family camping trip. The weather was certainly not great. It rained the first night but the tent had no leaks. Then a big storm rolled in on Saturday afternoon and broke all the poles in the back room of our tent. Everything got pretty wet inside. Yuck, wet sleeping bags = miserable Mommy. We managed to fix up the tent the best we could with rope, duct tape and a tarp. Luckily it stopped storming after dinner. Cameron absolutely adored our camping weekend. He had a great time with the other kids in our camping party. A great trip despite the yucky weather.

A special thanks to Laura over at "Kinder Kraziness" for featuring me on her "Someone New" Sunday post and a friendly welcome to any new followers who found me through her link. Here's a link to her post that featured my little Canadian blog.

 Once school starts back I hope to be sharing lots of classroom ideas that work well for my combined Grade One/Two class.

Though my constant blog stalking I have heard many people mention this lovely book First Day Jitters. I am on the hunt for my own copy. Hopefully I can pick one up on our trip to the city this week. Anyways, Jessica at "A Turn to Learn" featured this great jitters inspired linky. I just adore her blog. Her tutorials are so simple and easy to follow. I have learned so many awesome things! So to show my bloggy appreciation for all the great things she shares on her blog I am linking up to the party.

What are you feeling 'jittery' about?  I hope that you can join in on the fun too!

Thanks for reading and following,

TPT SALE

Happy Friday! It looks like its going to be a rainy weekend:( We have reservations to go camping and Cameron was so excited. Now the forecast is calling for rain all week. Not just rain though but thundershowers. Double yuck.We have a tent. I'm not a big camping person but I was excited for camping with my little boy. Camping in a tent in during a thunder storm just doesn't seem safe to me. We will cross our fingers that the forecast is wrong or will change. Send some good weather vibes our way!

It looks like I will have some shopping to complete before our hopeful camping expedition. TPT is having a Back to School Sale! Awesome!

My wish list is getting quite large, so I think that I will definitely grab some those fantastic deals! Some sellers are offering additional sales at their stores too, so you could save up to 28%!

While checking google reader this morning I came across an awesome blog hop where some sellers are featuring one of their Back to School products. I think I've added ten more products to my TPT shopping cart already! I love to gather a little bit more information about products before I purchase them. So if you feel the same way go check out the blog hop.



Also don't forget to enter the Cameo giveaway.

I can't believe how amazing everyone's creations are turning out! Every trip I take to Michael's usually involves me eying up the Cricut machines. I could never justify the price once considering the cost of buying additional cartridges. But the Cameo seems like a dream. My understanding is that you don't have to buy any cartridges! The cameo works with your existing clip art and fonts. Sounds fantastic to me! It's definitely been added to my future wish list. Maybe Santa can deliver one to me for Christmas, although I'm not sure I can wait that long!

I hope that everyone has a great weekend. Hopefully the storms stay away, I'm OK with rain but please no thunder and lightning. Thanks for reading and following,



Monday Made it

I'm linking up again with 4th Grade Frolics for Made it Monday.

I didn't have much time to craft this week because we were celebrated my son's sixth birthday yesterday with my side of the family. (His actual birthday falls on Wednesday) I did make a cake, does that count? I'm kind of embarrassed to even post a picture. Normally, I would buy a cake but Cameron recently fell in love with a cake that my sister in law made using Dream Whip for icing. He raved about that simple cake for weeks, so I had to bake one for his birthday. I figured I would pick up some green coloured icing to write Happy Birthday and was swayed into purchasing this lovely product.

I thought that I could write on the cake and then switch tips and make some decorative 'thingys'. As you can tell by my cake decorating vocabulary, this is not my hidden talent. Anyways, the star tip made some lovely star 'bursty' like lumps. However, that can of icing was not user friendly when it came to writing. Certain times tons would come out. Then nothing came out for the next letter. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong. But hey it tasted good, so I guess that's all that matters in the end.

The masterpiece - notice skinny P versus fat P in the word HAPPY

I did make one thing for school this week. I printed out and put together my teaching planner binder. I used the free printable from The Resource(ful) Room.

Amy has lots of amazing things on her site. Be sure to go and check out her website. I ended up organizing my things into two separate binders. One binder contains my lesson plans, calendar, standards, student info/IEPS, meetings. The other binder will contain my reading information - groupings, conferences, tracking/assessment information, etc. I think that they will really help me stay organized next year.

I can't wait to see what everyone else was creating. Thanks for reading and following,

August Currently

I am linking up for the first time to the 'Currently' linky party over at Oh' Boy 4th Grade. I've been wanting to link up since I first started blogging last month, so here it goes.

I am currently loving the Olympics, and to my surprise my five year old son is loving watching them too. I kind of expected him to put up a fuss to watch his Disney Channel shows but he hasn't at all!

Today I finished Cameron's yearly shutterfly photo book. I make one every year just before his birthday. This year's book includes photos from when Cameron was five years old. If you haven't created a photo book you need to right now! I am horrible at printing off photographs, but each year I create and order a photo book for Cameron. They are my most treasured possessions. You can check mine out at the link below.

Shutterfly photo books offer a wide range of artful designs and embellishments to choose from.

Click here to view this photo book larger

The next three items all involve B2S of course. Squeezing every last bit of fun out of summer, getting some pampering for myself, and dreading the organizational task of sorting books.

My B2S must have items are pretty self explanatory. #1 - Love my laminator, couldn't live without it. #2 Love my sharpie markers, need to get the 80's set before its gone. #3 Need my checklists to survive. Love technology and now I use my iphone for this task all the time! Thanks for reading and following,

The challenges of a combined class

Happy Friday bloggers and blog stalkers! In Ontario, we teach until almost the end of June, but we don't go back to school until after Labour Day in September. This means that I have exactly one month of summer vacation remaining. Wow, that first month of July just flew by! We had a quick visit to school earlier this week and I took a couple pictures of my classroom but I only had my cellphone. Please excuse the quality of the pictures.

My word wall will go here

Checking to see that my Cafe Strategies fit so I can add a space for the post it goals

My teachers desk along with a small work table.

 

As many of you are aware, I am scheduled to teach a combined Grade One / Two class in September at my new school. Among my efforts to work smarter and not harder I was searching for a document that would easily let me compare the expectations in each subject area across the two grades. Well I searched and searched and came up empty. There doesn't appear to be any document available that shows this information in an easy to read format.

I decided that I should attempt to put something together myself. I figure it will allow me to easily compare the expectations and plan accordingly to accommodate both sets of expectations within my lessons. I don't have the time or the energy to present two totally separate lessons so this comparison document will allow me to easily visualise the differences between the two grades. I'm hoping that I can deliver my whole group lessons to cover common expectations, and use my small group and guided instruction to cover the unique expectations. Hope that all makes sense.

So far, I have completed the language and math comparisons for the Ontario Curriculum in Grades One and Two. I have uploaded the documents to Google Docs, hoping that some of my fellow Ontario colleagues can also benefit from the information. Here are the links.

Ontario Combined Grade One/Two Language Expectations

Ontario Combined Grade One/Two Math Expectations

I am hoping to complete the other subject areas over the next few weeks and I will continue to post the links. I am hoping there are some Ontario teachers who can benefit from their use. Thanks for reading and following,