One Month... Time to get Serious!

School is just ONE.MONTH.AWAY!!! It seems like I just got out of school yesterday! Of course, technically with all my travel/workshops, I have been "in school" for most of the summer. Last week, I was in Albany, NY attending a Forensic Science workshop and wowzers, that's going to be an AWESOME course!!! However, we won't teach it until spring semester, so I stiffled my excitement to start working on some other items.

Target Time!!!
Oh man, oh man, the BEST part of summer is scouring the Dollar Spot at Target! As soon as I got home, Target was on my must-go-to-right-away list! And I'm so glad I did... check out the awesomeness that is The Dollar Spot!

Now this is a very small selection of the goodies I picked up because the next day, I decided to visit a few more local stores looking for pocket charts. (For those of you wondering why I want pocket charts in high school, make sure to check out this post from "i is a number".)

Now back to the goodies above. See the mini composition book in the middle? Well, it's really a sticky note pad that looks like this:

Let's pretend for a moment that you are an algebra teacher... (oh wait, I *am* an algebra teacher!) Can you imagine how awesome it would be to help a kid work a problem AND graph it without swapping papers multiple times?? Oh, and best part, they also had a dry erase version of the same thing for use under a document camera! WIN!! :)

Shopping Time is over... on to the Creating

Honestly, when I work up this morning, I had *no* idea what to do for my #Made4Math project. So after giving my kitty her medicine and feeding her, I came up to my office to start working on my to-do list. Throughout the course of the day, I got a few projects done, so I thought I'd share them! (Fair warning... these are only going to be useful to AP Stat teachers... sorry for anyone that is looking for general items of mathy-ness!

Formative Assessment
If you've followed me at all this summer, you know that one of my goals is to increase student engagement and the use of formative assessment tools in my classroom. After reading Embedded Formative Assessment, I knew that one thing I really wanted to do was add in more multiple choice questions to my lessons. In particular, I wanted to use more released AP questions and AP-inspired questions to gauge student understanding. So one of the first things I did this morning was to print off all of the released Multiple Choice questions and read through them to classify them by chapter in my text book. Then I created this handy "cheat sheet" to help me stay organized...

If you teach out of BVD 3/e and want a copy, send me an email or leave a comment and I'll forward it to you. (Disclaimer: I do not promise that this document is typo-free!)

Also, isn't the font just ADORABLE? After a Twitter discussion yesterday on fonts, I totally started crushing on this font and couldn't wait to use it in a project! (thanks @kathrynfreed for the link!). I also made a binder cover using it... totally my new favorite!

AP Stat Live Binder
Also today, I was looking through my notebook from last year and decided I needed a better way to organize the articles that I like to use in AP Stat. Sometimes these are articles I print off for students to read, sometimes it's a news clip that I use in class, etc. I had been wanting to try Live Binders for a while, so here was my chance!

This was really easy to make and I can see great uses for LiveBinders! Over on the left, I organized by the units in my curriculum, then did subtabs for each article under the unit. YAY for organization!! :)

So what did YOU make this week?
Head on over to the #Made4Math blog and check out the other submissions!

Target is my bestestest friend :)

If you are a teacher and you have not shopped at Target, you are missing out! My two favorite "teacher stores" are Dollar Tree and the Target dollar aisle :) Of course, I had started to hear rumblings that the school supplies were out, so I had to go check it out this morning and see what all I could find! After an hour and $75 were gone, here are my goodies...

My original goal and purpose of going to Target this morning was to find this file box to put inside my brand new teacher bag. (Spoiler alert! See the teacher bag unveiling on Monday's #made4math post)

But in order to fetch the lovely file box, I had to pass by the Target Dollar Spot at the front of the store! Oh my, oh my, what wonderful goodies they had!!! One of the first bins had this cute stackable storage boxes. They had them in black, pink, and blue. I plan to use them in my cabinets to store things like paper clips, post its, etc. The boxes even have a place for a nametag at the front. The round things in front are magnetic canisters. I had seen similar items at the Container Store where you could put small items in them, screw on the lid, and then use the magnet to hang them. I will probably use at least one or two in my new teacher bag :)

Turn the corner and what do I see? Oh, be still my heart! I bought the border since it coordinates with my color scheme on the back bulletin boards. I'm going to steal an idea from Pinterest and laminate and put magnets on the back to create a "bulletin board" area on the whiteboard behind my desk. The other items are some adorable to-do lists that I just could not pass up for $1. The calendar looking thing is a mousepad with tear off sheets. I am one of those people that always has tons of post it notes stuck to my desk, so I'm hoping this will give me a place to jot down things.

So as I am digging around in the cool notepads, I see back in the far corner, hidden from view, these dry erase pockets! Oh my... I've hit the motherload!!! These suckers are VERY expensive to purchase from regular teacher stores! Needless to say, I bought a class set. :) Also picked up another mousepad and then a set of really cute file folder labels.

But, I am STILL not done with the dollar spot... Down on the bottom shelf, I find these adorable cardboard magazine files. I love these things for putting workbooks, notebooks, paperback solution guides, etc.

Finally, I leave the $1 section and head to the regular aisles to find my file box. Of course, I have to also go check out their progress on the back to school area. They were still stocking it, so I'm guessing that tomorrow's Target ad will start advertising their back to school sales. But, I did pick up a brand new lunchbox for this year. Actually, hubs saw it first, showed it to me, then started laughing at the look of pure joy on my face. :)

Now, before you start laughing too, let me explain :) My sisters and I started collect ladybug stuff years ago. We have matching ladybug tattoos on our toes (hence my twitter avatar), when we buy each other gifts, it always has a ladybug on it. The ladybug trend has extended to all of the women in our family. When my eldest sister passed away a few years ago, my middle sister and I put a ladybug beanie baby in her casket. Ladybugs are very important to me and it just makes me smile that I now have one to carry my lunch each day.

Whew! All that shopping has worn me out!

Please tell me that I'm not the only one with a Target obession?!?!? New school supplies make me happy, almost giddy with excitement!!! Yay for Target!