Monday Made It- June 15th

Inspiration from Monday Made It was one of the reasons why I joined the blog world, and I figure that it is FINALLY time for me to contribute back! So here's what I've been working on...

Garden Identifiers! We are adding an addition to our farmyard that will have a big kitchen that I can can in this year. So I thought "what the heck!" and grew a massive garden. I'm hoping that these stakes will help me from "weeding" my veggies. To make these lovelies I used whiteboard stakes from Joann's (may have purchased their whole stock) and white vinyl for the lettering. I didn't want to have to make new markers each year and the vinyl SHOULD stay on the chalkboard even when it gets wet. To transfer the letters cleanly I highly suggest that you get transfer paper. Also, if you don't already have a cricut... I'm not sure how you survive as a teacher. But seriously, if you don't have a cricut you need to go get one ASAP! 

My big ol' garden at the farm! 

Beautiful rainbow after a storm

Target has these AMAZING clip on labels for cube organizers! So much cuter than plastic tubs : )

Base ten blocks all organized and ready to go

Remember what I said about a cricut? GET ONE! It fosters that very unhealthy relationship all teachers have with vinyl. I probably could do a whole post on what I've use vinyl for in my classroom! Anyways, I just completed 2 weeks of summer institue on how we are completely revamping our math curriculum. I have a page about it at the top of my blog under "math" that explains the whole new curriculum, but the short story is that we are switching our main focus to conceptual understanding... meaning lots of math manipulatives! I typically have them all tucked away neatly until I think we need them for a lesson, but our instructor showed me the error of my ways and I needed a system that made my manipulatives available at ALL TIMES. With my lovely new vinyl labels my students can now easily access any materials they would like whenever they would like : )

New cowboy boot organizer!

I finally got around to staining my wooden crates and adding Massey's name to his toy box! I was bummed I couldn't find the stain I used for our pallet shoe organizer/bench, but I think it was a beautiful mistake because I'm loving the darker color of the crates so much more!

If only I could teach my border collie how to put his toys away...

 I guess that means it's time to revamp the bench too... don't you love how one project always sparks another?

Okay, technically this isn't a "made it" but this is honestly one of my favorite parts of summer... picking out a new color scheme for my room! I teach 5th grade so I like to have a more "grown up" feel and my room is super dark, so sadly black isn't ever happening again (see my old post on prior classroom color schemes). This year I decided to combine Creative Teaching Press painter's palette items with my old chevron borders from Teacher Created Resources. Each bulletin board will be color coded and the backgrounds will be white this year (one of the free "firecode" papers our school offers us for free). My green one is for language arts, blue for science, yellow is history, red is math, and grey is for IB action/inquiry. I will also have my first CAFE board that will use all of the colors : ) Thankfully I'm blessed with 6 bulletin boards in my classroom!

Blogger newbie issues... I just realized that pages aren't posts : ) Since this is something I wanted archived and not permanent I had to move it. You can find my current classroom underneath "my classroom" tab up top, but here are my past classrooms!

First Year of Teaching:
I was hired two weeks before school began, thankfully I lucked out with the brightest and most open layout of our school! It was clean and uncluttered (since I literally didn't own anything for teaching yet).

Before:

After: 

Second Year of Teaching:
Sadly, I had to move rooms when I moved with my kids from 4th to 5th grade. My new room was dark, faced the school parking lot, and had very little storage. But, it was a fun new challenge and I had started to finally accumulate some teaching supplies!

Before:

 After:

As I said before... I can't help but make changes every so often in my classroom. The new color scheme seemed too dark with my decorations so I took some pintrest inspiration and went full blown colorful!! 

Then... the black drove me nuts because it was still too dark in my classroom, check out how I fixed it by clicking on my page up top called "classroom"