Monday Made It! - July 27th

I'm joining Fourth Grade Frolics for Monday Made It again this week. I've been on vacation this last week, so my creations are computer generated.

My first Monday Made It! is a morning check-in for my kiddos for their reading. I used to have a calendar for each student, and in the morning, I would call out each child's name and they would tell me the title of the book they were reading and what page they were on. I like checking in with everyone, but honestly, it takes some time.  This year, I'm changing it up just a little bit. I created this form that I will post on the whiteboard, located next to the attendance board. When students move their number for attendance each day, they will write their name, title of the book and page number. I'll keep these in my notebook, so I'll be able to do a quick check from day to day and keep an eye on their reading life to use in individual conferences. This will leave time in our first period for our read aloud and a mini lesson.

My second Monday Made It! is a handout for my kiddos to keep for the year and refer to regularly. I have a large one printed and posted on my classroom wall, too. I try very hard to teach my students about a Growth Mindset. I think it's really important for them to know that I want them to take risks in their learning. Yes, they may fall/fail, but it this is an important part of learning! I will be there to help them and move from "I can't do it" to "I can't do it, YET".

My third Monday Made It! are my team's welcome letters for our fourth and fifth graders. We're departmentalized beginning in fourth grade, and our team teaches both fourth and fifth grade. Our welcome letter for our fourth graders is a way to hopefully reduce their anxiety about moving up to fourth grade and having four different teachers for their core classes. For our fifth graders, our welcome letter is really a welcome back and we're excited to teach you again this year. We'll send these out the week before school starts.

My fourth Monday Made It! is something for the first week of school. Our first full day of school this year is on a Tuesday. Our parents' night is Thursday of that same week. I like to have some type of writing up for the parents to see. In order to do this in two days, it has to be a pretty quick activity, so I created a newsletter for the kids to write articles about themselves.

My fifth and final Monday Made It! for the week is cards that will have my students' log in information for different websites such as Google Drive, our school website, Typing Pal, etc. I'm just waiting on their log in info from our IT guy and then I'll finish them up and laminate them. I'll attach these to the first page in their agendas because they take their agendas to every class and home every night. I'm hoping this will alleviate the nightly emails of "Johnny can't log in to Google Drive for his homework".

That's all for this week! What did you make this week?

Monday Made It! - July 20th

I'm joining up with 4th Grade Frolics again for Monday Made It! I don't have quite as many things completed as I had hoped to, but here they are: (sorry for the terrible picture quality!)

My first Monday Made It! is name tags I printed, laminated and cut out. Then I added them to 3M clips. I attach these to the wall outside my classroom, where I display some of my students' writing throughout the year.

My second Monday Made It! is numbers for my cubbies. The students from the other fourth grade homeroom use these to keep their LA things in. This helps stop the "I forgot that" or "I left that in my desk" situation.

I don't remake these every year - just when I am ready for a new color scheme:)

My third Monday Made It! is the display for my kiddos' birthdays. I printed, laminated and cut these out. Once I get my class list, I'll add the student names and birthdays, then post in my classroom on my birthday wall. These are for sale in my TpT store if you're interested. It also has birthday toppers for pencils, crazy straws or whatever (which I posted in a previous post you can find here: Monday Made It! July 6th edition).

My fourth Monday Made It! is for my classroom door. I'm going to have a bee theme, so I got my bees printed, laminated and cut. Like the birthdays, I'll add the names to the bees once I get my class list. I also made the letters for the saying on the door.

And finally, my fifth Monday Made It! is new library labels. I needed to replace book baskets because many of mine are broken. I found these plastic bins at the Dollar Store, so I bought 25 new bins and created labels. The picture is terrible - sorry, but they're made with a chalkboard background and different colored lettering. I love how they turned out!

That's it for this week. What did you make?

Monday Made It! - July 13th

Yay! It's Monday again and time for Fourth Grade Frolic's Monday Made It!

For my first Monday Made It, I printed and laminated Catherine's, from The Brown Bag, Subway Synonym Art to hang in my classroom. We're always working on word choice in our writing, so these are awesome.

My second Monday Made It! is also for display in my classroom. I'm going to teach my kids root words, prefixes and suffixes, and this resource is awesome, too! This is from Teaching to Engage, her Super Roots. 

My third Monday Made It! is actually something I saw from another teacher on Monday Made It and thought it would be the perfect to add to my classroom. We already do booktalks to share our love of books and recommendations, so I thought this would be a great way for my kiddos to get help finding a new book to read (from my 1000 book classroom library) when browsing the library. This is Book Buzz from Tales of a Tenacious Teacher.

My fourth Monday Made It! is some letters for my library area. I'm really pleased with how they turned out.

My fifth and last Monday Made It! is for my house. I desperately needed some new curtains. These were from Pottery Barn and have just been looking old and faded.

So these are the new ones - I love the way they turned out.

What did you make this week?

Monday Made It - July 6

I'm excited to participate in 4th Grade Frolics' Monday Made It for the second week in a row. Yay!

I'm posting my Monday Made It just a little bit late:) I made a few items for school this week. (They're terrible quality pictures - sorry!)

Made It! #1- I made was a bookmark to give all my kiddos on the first day of school. It is just the beginning of letting them know how much I value reading and that our classroom is full of readers.

Made It! #2 - a set of birthday toppers. I printed and laminated these and will attach them to some crazy straws I got at Michael's. The kids love these. The Birthday Toppers and Cupcakes are in a set I have for sale on Tpt (just click the link if you're interested). It includes 12 different colored Happy Birthday circles and 12 different colored cupcakes. I print and laminate the cupcakes, then write each student's name and birthday one and post on one of my cabinet doors.

Made It! #3 - the boy's and girl's bathroom pass. I will attach these to the hand sanitizer. This works great because instead of interrupting something going on in the classroom to ask to go to the bathroom, the student will just put the hand sanitizer on their desk. It's a visual for me to help remind me who is out of the room (only 1 girl and 1 boy at a time) and they get the reminder to actually USE the hand sanitizer when they return. Win, win.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep checking things off my list. Monday Made It! is a great motivator! What did you make?