Monday, August 5, 2013

Made4Math - More Classroom Pretties!





Welcome to another wonderful Monday! I can't believe it's August!!! Where the heck did summer go??? And to make it worse, today is the 8th anniversary of my 29-and-holding-on-with-dear-life birthday. As the old country song says... I'm much too young to feel this damn old! :) Anyway, let's move on to happier topics, because I just have to say that my room makes me smile everytime I walk into it! :)

Project #1 - The Hall Pass
While browsing Pinterest one day, I ran across THIS PIN, which linked to the cutest hall pass from The Brown Bag Teacher. She was very awesome and had the hall pass in downloadable format on her blog, but I really wanted to add my name/classroom and the instructions for the students to sign out on the hall pass log. That meant a few changes were in order and I needed to do some searching. I used Colour Lovers for the background and found the awesome frame at MyCuteGraphics. After printing it out and putting it on some purple paper for a color pop, here's my new hallpass:


I'm so pleased with how it turned out! I had some leftover badge holders from #TMC12, so I used those to hold the girls and boys passes, then used ID clips, so the students can clip it onto their shirt and I don't have to worry about where they are laying the pass down when they use the restroom. (EWWW) To make it easy to grab, I used rubber bands (hey, it was all I had available... don't judge!) and they are hanging on black push-pins on my bulletin board. I'm eager to see how this works this year :)

Project #2 - The Table Buckets
If you read the past from last week, I had some helpers on Tuesday that really knocked a lot of things out for me. My students are seated in groups of 4, and last year I used pencil boxes for each group to hold various supplies. I really wasn't a fan of that, so I purchased some buckets at Dollar Tree and got to work on making Table labels...


Again, Colour Lovers for the background and Digs My Hart as the font... Gosh, I really love that font! :)

Of course, the inside of the bucket is pretty special too...


Here you can see the 4 sets of scissors, a set of Green/Yellow/Red cups for group work, and Project #3...

Project #3 - Formative Assessment FlipCards
I have really loved reading Embedded Formative Assessment this summer (twice so far!) and I've always wanted to use clickers in my class, but it just didn't work out. I hated the transition time, the management, etc. So here are my low-tech clickers...




I made them colorful so that I could ask questions based on color (Red if you are stuck, etc), multiple choice (A-E), or on the back, true/false, agree/disagree, or a "?" if kids had questions or no clue where to go from there. Again, this is in Digs My Hart font and I really appreciate my helpers last week laminating, cutting, hole punching, and binder-ringing them together for me!

So what did you make this week? Head on over to the Made4Math blog to see the rest of this week's goodies! Don't forget to submit your post HERE

2 comments:

Kathryn said...

You've been busy! I'll be interested to hear how the hall passes work out. My middle school students have a tendency to flush all sorts of things so I'm going to stick with my large wooden passes.

Your response cards turned out well! I like the ? choice.

Monika said...

What a great idea! Definitely something I can use in my classroom this year. I am doing more hands-on activities and less paperwork, so the kids would really like this. Do you have a template for this?