Monday Made It (Woop! Woop!)

I am super excited to be linking up with Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics for her weekly Monday Made It!  I have TONS to do this summer and I am happy to report I have already accomplished many LARGE items on my list.

So here it goes...

My hubby and I have been redoing our back yard in small portions since we moved in to our house around three and a half years ago.  So that is my first Monday Made It this week.  We FINISHED our yard and now I can just sit and enjoy it.  I love sitting on my patio and enjoying the evening weather when it is not too hot to go outside.

My second Made It is my garden.  There is nothing better than growing your own produce.  I love going out and picking my own zucchini or corn on the cob for dinner.  The garden is obviously still in the baby stages but everything is sprouted and growing.  I cannot wait for our first harvest of the year. Yummy!

While I promised myself that I would work on my house before I worked on school things (it is AMAZING how neglected things can become during the school year!) I couldn't help but put together a "get to know you" activity for my students to start the year.  I posted about it earlier this weekend so if you want to read more about it you can do that here or you can pick it up at my tpt store here.  I think we are going to have a TON of fun with it!

Well, those are my Made Its for this week!  I am excited about what I have planned for my MMI this coming week.  It is something I have wanted to do for a while, and I think it will make my life a lot easier.  Fingers crossed it turns out like I plan!

Now I am off to see what other wonderful Made Its are out there!  You all are soooo creative (can you see I am green with envy?)

Nicole

Starting the Year...

Just like most teachers out there I use the summer to plan, plan, plan.  Always looking for fun and exciting ways to start the new school year, I decided my old tried and true activities were a bit....boring!  I have done the make a quilt square about yourself activity, make a tshirt to tell about yourself activity, draw your summer in the sunglasses activity...and many many others.  While I think these are pretty fun, my students do not!  That is not the foot I want to get off on.  So I decided to think of things kids are "in to".  I teach third graders and many of them are getting their first cell phones and the ones that do not yet have phones are anxiously awaiting the day their parents cave in :)  I decided it would be fun to have them draw a "sellfie" showing important things they would like their new teacher and new classmates to know about them.  Always the literacy teacher, the students will also write clues about themselves.  Starting pretty ambiguously at first and becoming more and more detailed.  I will collect the selfies and clues and read them to the class.  The student's classmates will guess who the selfie belongs to based on the clues the student gave.  I have done something similar to the clues idea before and the kids LOVE it!

We then have a parent "curriculum night" about two weeks into the school year where I meet with the parents and tell them everything their child will learn in third grade (hahaha), I am thinking these selfies and paragraphs would be a great bulletin board to get us started and I can then have something fun and academic for when the parents come.  If you would like this idea and would like to pick it up, visit my tpt store here.

What kind of fun things do you do with your class to start the year?

Nicole