Sunday, October 20, 2013

No Tricks, Just Treats Giveaway!

An amazing blogger friend of mine has just hit her 1,000 follower milestone on TpT and Facebook so she is celebrating by having 5 days of giveaways! The first day is all about teacher style. Make sure to head over and check her out. You'll find one of my Infinity Scarves in amongst the goodies! Just click the picture below to see what she's giving away and be sure to check back over the next 5 days to see what else she has!
 
 
 
Have a great rest of the weekend!
 
Katie

Friday, October 18, 2013

Pumpkin Five For Friday

Yay for Friday!! Be sure to check out the other Five For Friday posts here:


 
This week was our first week back from break. Thankfully I was able to enjoy a bit of our break by going to a Kid's Museum with my girls. They loved it!! This was just a tiny bit of the awesome wonderfulness at this place!!
 
 

 
Now that we're back and it's fall, we started back with talking about the life cycle of a pumpkin. I found this great dry erase contact paper on clearance over break and decided to put a chunk on one of my cabinets so I had extra writing space when teaching. LOVE IT!!
 
 

 
One of the science projects we do every year is to cut a pumpkin open, fill it with dirt (don't take the seeds out!), and watch pumpkins grow inside of the pumpkin! My daughter helped me out by filling it with dirt this morning.



 
We're also talking about the parts of a pumpkin so my class made these super cute diagrams of a pumpkin with all the labeled parts!
 
 
 
 
Finally, although it took me a couple days, I was even able to make a little something this week. The Kindergarten team at my school is wonderful and I tend to go to them when I have questions (I teach Pre-K so it only makes sense to ask the grade my kiddos will be moving up to). So, when they started talking about needing some new rhyming activities, I jumped on it and created my 72 page rhyming packet! In fact, it will be on sale until tomorrow night! Just click the picture above to take a look at it.
 
Enjoy your weekend!
Katie
 

Saturday, October 12, 2013


 
Gotta love a good sale! To celebrate reaching 100,000 fans on Facebook, TpT is having a flash sale until tomorrow night! Just enter the code FB100K to get 10% off your total purchase. Plus, to help celebrate, I have everything in my store on sale for 20% giving you a total savings of 28%!!
 
Be sure to check it out before it's over!!
 
 
 
Katie

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Make It Monday and Currently (a little late)

Alright, I'll give you all a little fair warning... this might be a bit of a lengthy post. After all, Make It Mondays are only once a month now so I have to put a month's worth of "Make Its" into one post!
 
 
 
Listening: My girls are absolutely obsessed with the Disney Channel right now so that's about all they watch when the TV is actually on and, of course, they are hard of hearing and love to argue so they like to keep it nice and loud so they can hear it no matter where they are in the house ;)
 
Loving: Our school district does a modified year round schedule so, although we only get 6 weeks off in the summer, we get 2 weeks in the fall, winter, and spring. Not bad when you live in the desert and it's nicer in the fall anyway!
 
Thinking: Of course being the OCD type of person I am, I cannot fully enjoy break unless my house is clean, lesson planning for the next 3 weeks is done, groceries are bought, bills paid... you get the point. So, although I am on break, I'm kind of not...
 
Wanting: Being on break you would think I would be very well-rested... Not with 2 little girls in the house. We purposely let them stay up past their bed time during break with the hopes that they will sleep in. Nope! They still get up at the same time and then they're just cranky all day. *sigh* You would think we would learn!
 
Needing: Like I said, I have lots of things to get done and my break is half over. However, unless the task requires me to sit in front of the computer and search for cute craft/teaching ideas on Pinterest, it's not going to get done unless I get a serious dose of motivation some time soon!
 
Trick or Treat: I know this is probably a pretty obvious trick but I just discovered it recently and it has proven to be a HUGE lifesaver so far! I, like so many teachers out there, have an extensive collection of teacher resource books. Ones like "Sight Word Mini-Books" and "Math Card Games". Resources that would be wonderful to use in my classroom. And what do I do with them? The books sit on a bookshelf making it look like I use them and am a super awesome teacher when, in fact, they haven't ever been opened more than once when I looked at them in the store. They were bought with good intent but then, once it came time to plan my lessons, seemed like a huge waste of time to leaf through a hundred teacher books for one activity that was suitable. My solution? I took all my spare time over the past few weeks, looked through and marked any appropriate activities, and made copies of them. Then I took said copies and actually sorted them into the file folders that house all my resources for each unit. This way, if I come across an activity that reviews numbers 1-10, I am able to put it in with the rest of my Fall activities since that's when we'll be reviewing 1-10. Once I go to plan that unit, I'll have the activity already in the file and won't have to search through a stack of teacher books! Makes my planning so much easier and now I can bless one of my fellow teacher with a big stack of teacher books!!
 
 
 
Now for a few Monday Make It items. I stumbled upon a new method of knitting that is much faster than regular knitting and doesn't require anything but yarn and your fingers. In fact, it's much faster than regular knitting too! It's called "finger knitting" and I am addicted. I started making these scarves and fell in love instantly! Plus, I made cute little clips that can be used as an accent on the scarf or as a clip in the wearer's hair! The best part is that they can be looped 2 or three times for an adult or loop it an extra time to fit a child!

 
Green and purple

 
Gray and gold with a gold bow

 
Bow clip

 
Back of bow clip

 
Purple blue and gray with bow

 
Purple blue and gray bow

 
Back of bow

 
Maroon and gold
 
These are all available in my Etsy shop!
 
After all, fall is finally here!!
 
Plus, I am bound and determined to use Lite Brites in my classroom so I decided to make a set of papers with uppercase and lowercase letters on them so I could use them in small group centers. Now to just invest in the Lite Brites!
 

Have fun!
 
 
Katie