Heart Attack!

It has been brought to my attention multiple times recently that this blog is in serious need of an update.  True that.

While we do have some big projects that we have suddenly undertaken around the house (lots of new appliances are involved, in more than one room!), this post is not about that.  

This post was pretty much hand-delivered to me by a friend at work.  

See, this friend was having a tough week last week, so my friend Kim and I wanted to do something on Friday morning to cheer her up.  Kim had heard about a "heart attack" from her church friends, and we decided it would be a fun idea to replicate in our friend's classroom. 

This lovely friend was nice enough to take pictures of what we did and put them into a cute collage, which she mentioned would be "perfect for a blog". :)

Although our signs weren't as cute as I'd hoped (thanks to my color ink running out), it still got the point across!  We put heart cut-outs all over her room (including on her desk, although she didn't take pictures of that personal space).  In other words, we gave her a "heart attack"!  We also gave her a basket with her name on it filled with a few of her favorite things.  

It was fun to try to surprise her and to collect some goodies that we knew she would like.  I am definitely storing this idea in my brain to use again in the future!  It would be fun to do to a friend or neighbor's front door, or in the bathroom for a spouse or child to see when they wake up, or in many other places, too!

Crate Seats

While surfing around some teachers' message boards this summer, I saw a pic. someone posted of an adorable seat they made from a regular old file crate.  Of course, I thought it was the cutest thing ever, and decided i just had to make some for my classroom.  Six $3 crates...

and a yard of half-price fabric later...

here is the final product.  

They were super easy to make, albeit a bit time-consuming.  We got some leftover plywood from my parents' addition/renovation, and Stephen cut it to fit inside the lip of the crates (it doesn't seem like it would be very sturdy, but I was very pleasantly surprised!)  I covered the plywood with some batting and fabric (lots of staples in each), and that was it!  I still need to glue on a loop of ribbon to make it easier to pop open the "lid", but it's easy enough to take off the top without it for now. 


 

Not so attractive from the bottom side, but luckily that part is hidden!  I haven't decided for sure how I will use them in my room.  I have tossed around ideas of using them at the listening center (with the listening books & tapes stored inside), at the computers, and around the small group reading table.  For now, they are living at the reading table.  

We will see how they work there in a month or so when we start reading groups.  I still think they are the cutest (and easiest) project... and so useful for storage, too!

Happy first day of school!

Back to School

As we all know, it's back-to-school time!  For me, this means spending countless hours preparing my classroom for the new year.  This is my third classroom in three years, which means lots of packing, unpacking, organizing, re-organizing, arranging, hanging, and re-hanging.  It also means staying at school for 12-14 hours each day to go from this

to this. 

This room will be filled with 17 little ones bright & early tomorrow morning, and I will hereby be exhausted for the next two weeks (it is a well-known fact that the first two weeks of kindergarten are, for lack of a better term, completely insane).  There is one little project that I hope to share on here in the next few days, that is if I can manage to get home before dark.  Directly at the bottom center of this photo is a little preview of the project.