Breaking all the rules..

My friend Denise just yelled at me because it is summer and I am NOT... absolutely NOT... supposed to be doing anything related to school! However, I am not always the rule follower so here I sit thinking of all kinds of things I could be making and playing with! I've been so inspired by Pinterest (aka "The Time Suck") and all of the blogs on Pinterest that I wanted to find a way to keep track of all of those cool things I do all year long! So.. a little about me. I am a fourth grade teacher, and I am just changing to a new school. It is super exciting and a little scary at the same time! I am not sure yet if I will need to do all the same things I normally do at the start of school. I love to run, read, and relax. Bright colors and sparkly things are very exciting. I started two projects tonight (besides this one):1. Paint Chip-palooza!! I have always loved the paint chip aisle at any place that sells paint. It is so bright and cheerful! So when I saw an idea on Pinterest to make a calendar using paint chip samples I thought how awesomely colorful will that be?!! I started today by choosing my colors and cutting off the end that has the words on it. Tomorrow or Monday, I will get a poster frame so I can put it together. I will post a picture of it when it is finished. I chose all shades of blue and some greens because my classroom theme is underwater/Fish (particularly Finding Nemo!) I was having so much fun with the paint chips that I had to find something else to make too! I found the links to word family activities with the paint chips, and I made 3 sets. I used a Sharpie to write on the cards. They are certainly colorful! I am still looking for other ideas to use these fabulous things for! I am thinking of making the Synonmym Flowers to find better and "brighter" words. I also had the idea of making place value charts. I want to use interactive math notebooks this year, and I am sure we can find tons of uses for them in there!2. Figuring out how to use Pages on my iPad to create fun documents! I finally discovered how to save a file as a pdf so that I can actually use the things I make on my iPad the other day. That opened up a whole new world for me! I love pages because it is a combination of Word and Publisher. Tonight I figured out how to make the document have a background of things that do not move as you move the objects around on the main page. I made a first attempt at a newsletter format, and was able to include cute little Nemo pictures. It looks great so far, although a little plain in some areas so I will have to keep working on that one. I will upload some pictures as I start to get things together. I am excited for this year, and hopefully will have some cool things to share of my own!

I also started making my new place value chart. I used to have one that was a giant caterpillar. Each body segment was a large brightly colored oval. In each segment was the name of the place, and an example of it. I decided that the caterpillar did not really fit my underwater/finding Nemo/Fish theme. I made it with fish.. See the picture below for an example. :) I will laminate it and cut them out with places from one millions down to hundredths. They are sized proportionally so that the places which have the smallest value have the smallest shapes.