Monday Made It: Fabric Napkin Art

I'm coming to you LATE for Monday Made It! I usually have these pre-typed up on Sunday nights but I was a busy lady, so here we go now!

Today I only have a home Monday Made It, which is weird for me because at the beginning of the summer, I didn't think I'd ever have one. 

BUT, I am moving out next week! And my new apartment has super super boring walls and I need some snazzy things to hang up.

So I made some fabric napkin art!

I was inspired by Kate at The Small Things Blog. She has a pretty good tutorial up there, so I didn't make a new one. But here are my little tricks and tips:

• I bought my fabric napkins at World Market. Don't even think about going anywhere else. World Market has TONS of awesome patterned napkins and they are reasonably priced! I found these in the clearance section at $1.98 each, and I bought 3 identical napkins. I just featured different parts of the napkin in each frame!
• My sweet square frames came from Dollar Tree and they were $0.50!!!! They are metal, not wood like Kate's, but I am on a budget here people! They were originally frames to hold 5 tiny pictures but I just threw out the little insert thing.
• After I decided which part of the napkin I wanted to show, I cut around it with an additional 2 inch border. I wrapped the napkin around the cardboard backing and then hot glued the edges to the back (remember, I love hot glue!!). I did take a picture of that part to show you... it's a little dark.

• In the end I just shoved it back into the frame. The kind I had was the kind where you slide the backing into the bottom. With the napkin glued it just barely fit so I had to use all my might. :)

So there you have it! 

You could totally use this in the classroom. It would be cheap if you just used scrapbook paper or a school-themed fabric... or a printed fabric to match your classroom theme!

And as a special treat, here are my cousins and me last night during Pinterest crafting!!!

Hope your Monday was fantastic!!!

Shape Birds

With our days left in the single digits, I wasn't planning to start new math units.

With Watercolor Day on Friday, I knew I had to come up with something fun to paint.

So I turned to the creative genius at Deep Space Sparkle for inspiration, and we made shape birds! A little math and a lot of watercoloring. They loved it!

Source: deepspacesparkle.com via Jill on Pinterest

Here we are working hard!

And here are a few of our masterpieces...

 Apparently one of the birds was working out... haha!

Super cute, so fun, and just beautiful. :)

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

We celebrated Chinese New Year this week!

We started off the week with my fave, Scholastic News.

I just learned a couple of cool things that you might want to know if you have Scholastic News. First, starting soon, you'll be able to level up or level down the issues for your lower or higher readers! Second, I figured out a sweet way to manipulate the Scholastic News website to give me harder activities for my second graders. I like to do the magazine and then give them one of the "skills sheets" because they're usually semi-fun. Well, we get the first grade edition and the skill sheets are waaaaaay too easy. So I changed the website address a bit and now I can access the second grade skills sheets! They look almost the same but they're a little harder. The second graders like having harder work to do, and also this week the second grade page covered compass roses, which we learned about back here!

That was a lengthy paragraph that maybe didn't make sense.

Anyway, we watched the Scholastic News video 3 times and read the magazine and the kids could not get over the dragon! They thought it was amazing.

On Tuesday, we made paper lanterns to decorate our room.

I found the patterns here and I just used the blank template. Shockingly, first and second graders are NOT too cool for Kai-lan. They are incredibly sensitive about things that they are too cool for, including Dora and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

We also did tangrams, which I talked about here.

Today, we finished up Chinese New Year by using chopsticks! I was able to get a bunch donated to me from my favorite Chinese restaurant, and the kids were super excited. We practiced picking up cotton balls. I read on someone's blog that her kids practicing picking up little pom poms. I didn't have any of those but I had a plethora of cotton balls!

Here's my little teacher helping the first graders!

They also ate fortune cookies! They all ended up with really nice fortunes, so that was good. On Monday, I had told them that they were going to eat Chinese food, which really just meant fortune cookies. ALL week, every hour, they asked when we were going to eat Chinese food. I even got this weird pair of notes on my desk that I found after school.

They were slightly disappointed that they didn't get noodles.

Oh! I almost forgot. I also showed them this story from Starfall. Click on the screenshot to check it out!

It was fun for them to hear a traditional Chinese story, and it gave us a chance to talk about fables! And also morals of stories. The Starfall story was fun too because I clicked on the pictures and they moved around.

Here are a few of the actual books that I read for Chinese New Year.

Both were good! The first was more informational, the second was a fictional story. I recommend them. :) I'm actually mad because I saw The Runaway Wok at a Scholastic warehouse sale and I didn't get it.... and now I wish I had. Oh wells.

How did you celebrate Chinese New Year? I wish I would have done more but I hope I at least piqued somebody's interest in my class!

A Little Christmas, A Little Community

We had a pretty busy day today!

First, today is St. Nicholas Day. Teaching at a Catholic school, I feel pretty confident in celebrating this. Our religion book had me talking about St. Nicholas last week, so I threw it out there that December 6th was the official day. And that we should put our shoes out and see if St. Nicholas comes to see us!!!!

Well, that was last week.

Today, when the kids came skipping in the room, they said, "Can we put our shoes out in the hallway???" And I was like, "OH NO!" Totally forgot to get stuff for them. I really need to keep candy bags in my desk!!

But, no worries. My wonderful friend Stacy who teaches 3rd/4th grade came to the rescue during math stations!

The purple shoe is mine... they made me put mine out too, haha!! They totally did not see through this, yeah!

Today I also read Tomie dePaola's The Legend of the Poinsettia.

It was really meaningful to my Spanish speakers that I read this book about Mexico and they were amazed that I could read the 10 Spanish words in the book! :)

Afterwards, we watercolored stained glass pictures of poinsettias (here's the template). My kids love watercoloring and I think their pictures always look so beautiful! One thing I am definitely grateful for about my students is that they always give 100%, even if it's just watercoloring. :)

Aaaaand lastly, we are studying communities in Social Studies right now. They've had a pretty tough time remembering which type of community is which, you know, urban, suburban, and rural. I did a quick Google Reader search for anything to help us, and I found this great foldable idea at Keeping Up With Class!

Even though it legit took me 15 minutes to figure out how to fold these little books... the kids ended up loving them. I hope we can review them over and over and finally master these important vocab words!

Tomorrow I am SUPER excited to do our December math quilt that I got from Reagan at Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits!!!! Our entire afternoon (which is when we normally have math) is being taken over by our Christmas music program practice.... so I will squeeze this into the morning!!! Party time!

Wrapping Up Thanksgiving

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving! It has been nice to relax. I read a whole book so far this break, and I haven't read for fun since probably September. So that makes me happy!

I never go out for Black Friday, but I went today to the teacher store because they had a 35% off sale!!! I didn't buy a ton of things, but this is what I picked up:

I bought the place value pocket chart because I don't have one and I've been thumb-tacking Ziploc bags to my bulletin board........ I think this might be a little classier. I bought the rest of my calendar days which I LOVE! I am obsessed with these Poppin' Patterns days. Then I got 12 Smencils to give my students as part of their Christmas presents. Those Smencils really jacked up the total price. They'd better love them!!

And here are a few other things we did for Thanksgiving this week. We were in school on Monday, Tuesday, and half of Wednesday so I tried to sneak in lots of academic Thanksgiving activities to keep their brains in the room!!

We made the Thanksgiving retelling bracelets, which I found at First Grade a la Carte! They loved these things, even the boys! I had a ton of these beads at my house, so I was able to make little baggies for each kid, but I didn't have brown. I went to like 5 stores, no brown beads!!! So I explained the sad situation to the kids and told them to pretend there was one there. One intuitive kid made her own brown bead out of construction paper, haha!!!!! Here is hers.

And here is everybody's!

We also dot-painted, which was inspired by this pin...

[source]

Ours didn't turn out quiiiiite as perfectly as hers did. Now that I translate her blog from Italian into English, it looks like she drew a circle for their dots to stay inside. Ours were more creative-looking, and they liked doing it!

At the last minute on Monday night, I saw Mrs. Sauod's post about Thanksgiving activities connected to books. I immediately replaced whatever else I was going to do with her cute suitcase idea! I read a Thanksgiving book, and then had them close their eyes and imagine that they are going on the Mayflower. Since there were so many people, they could only take 4 things. What would they take??

I thought I'd get some crazy answers, but they mostly said things like their bed, their blanket, their dog, their families, and so on. About half of them said pop. Can't survive 66 days at sea without pop, I guess!! They loved the little suitcases. They wanted to carry them all over the room, which was pretty cute. I think I'll use these again when I do Mrs. Bainbridge's Christmas Around the World unit!

In second grade, we wrote acrostic poems about what we were thankful for. They had to be creative and use adjectives for some of the letters.

 [I like this one because she wrote iPads and iPhone 4 for her two I words! That cracked me up. Also she is thankful for being a kid, aw.]

 [We're reading Nate the Great in second grade, so I guess she really is liking it! Also for her last G, she wrote "second grade." Aw again!!]

 [And this girl was a little reliant on adjectives... nice people... kind people... very nice friends... good friends... ay caramba.]

And the last thing we did before we ran home at 12:30 on Wednesday was our award ceremony! I got these super cute thankful certificates from Erica Bohrer. I read everyone's aloud and we all clapped and were excited for each other! They loooooooved the ceremony and they were so happy with what I wrote to them. I wrote to one girl that I was thankful for her because she always made me laugh, and her face looked like I gave her a million dollars. It made me happy. :) We don't have a color printer at school so I just printed it on colorful paper. Also I am annoyed that this dumb picture is coming out sideways!!!

So now that Thanksgiving is over, I guess it's time to start Christmas...? How soon are you starting with your class?

What I'm Loving ... Thursday?

I just realized it isn't Wednesday. I mean, I knew it all day, but the whole way home from school I was thinking about what to write for WILW this week. Apparently it's Thursday so today it is WILT!! Wilt!

I'm loving my class, again. They're a handful and we have a lot of emotions running through our 12 little bodies, but they are funny and I like being their teacher. Today, as I was setting my phone timer for an activity in Math, the first graders asked if I was calling my boyfriend. I said, "Why would I call him now? We are in the middle of math!" And one girl said, "You could call him and say, 'I'm teaching the kids! Don't talk to me!'" (said in a very angry voice). They make me laugh a lot.

I'm loving the baby steps I'm taking towards Math Work Stations! Finally! It only took 32 days of school!! I want to have my management board set up by Monday because I forgot to finish taking pictures of the kids. So far I have 3 stations set up, so over the weekend I should come up with 3 more so they can have a little variety in their lives. I will keep you all posted because today we (sort of) did them and it worked out really well! Except - I have an odd number of first graders and an odd number of second graders. Do you all make groups of 3? Because my groups of 2 worked together way better than my groups of 3, but I don't want to isolate anybody... hmm.

I'm loving that I learned how to use the little laminator at school today! Now I understand why everyone loves personal laminators. I think I should probably buy my own sleeves so that I don't get yelled at for depleting the resources.

I'm loving the post office down the street from my school! Our class is participating in the postcard exchange hosted by Primary Graffiti and The Techy Teacher, and today I called to see if my class could take a field trip there next week so we can be more invested in our postcard sending. They were cool with it and we're going in a week! There are definitely perks to teaching in a small town.

I'm loving Adventure to Fitness!!!!!!!! A lot!!!! Since I'm in a private school, I can't sign up because my school is not a choice. I've probably sent them 5 requests and they are just ignoring me. So, I asked my wonderful sister to sign up on my behalf and now my kids LOVE running with Mr. Marc! We've already had 3 days worth of indoor recess this week and this has saved me in a huge way.

I'm loving these super cute apples we made yesterday!

I got the idea from The First Grade Parade. It was really easy (I used contact paper) and the kids really liked it. Sadly we haven't had sun to shine through the tissue paper yet but they are so beautiful regardless. :)

I'm loving another thing about my students. They are really good at making up excuses for stuff in their own lives, so whenever something goes wrong in my room, they always come up with a reason for it. For example, we watched a little video about the planets today, and the audio kept skipping. It was super annoying. One of the kids was like, "It's fine, it's just because the planets are so far from the radio tower." I was like, "..... I'm sure that's it." They never get upset about anything! It is so funny.

Oh - I need a bit of advice. I have a student who literally will not do anything unless I stand there and tell him to. Like, he won't even write his name on his paper unless I prompt him. Today we did dictation, and at the end I collected their papers, and he literally wrote nothing. The whole time! My first graders are very dependent as a whole, but this is confusing to me. Any words of wisdom??

The Sun, Collaboration, and Free Educational Clip Art

We had a fun and successful week in first and second grades! I'm doing better with being consistent about behavior expectations, and the kids are really catching on to routines without me constantly reminding them. I am a happy camper. :)

I mentioned on Wednesday that we had started our space unit. On Thursday, we studied the sun. Our Science book included a little song about the sun to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. We didn't sing it... we just said it like a poem because, although I know the kids are only 6 and 7 and I shouldn't be self-conscious about singing in front of them.... I still am. Haha! Anyway, the song was legit and included a TON of facts about the sun. Then we made a little graphic organizer about the sun, but I forgot to take a picture of it!

Afterwards, I borrowed an idea from Mrs. M at The Techy Teacher and we watercolored pictures of the sun! Watercolors were not on my students' supply lists, but our awesome art teacher told me about the huge basket of watercolors in the art room! The kids were SO EXCITED about painting and they did so well! I started to explain watercolor expectations to them, but they informed me that they knew how to watercolor...... and they were right! No issues. :)

I left Mrs. M's examples on the TV screen so they could see that I didn't want them just to paint a yellow sun and call it a day. They did really well and I hung them up after school!

On Friday, the third and fourth graders came into our room to read us the fairy tales that they wrote.

I was really happy with how my students behaved! When the third and fourth graders came in, I was like, "WOW, there are a lot of people in here!" Then I realized that between the 2 classes, we only have 30 students................... which is the number that most other teachers have every day. I'd like to pat you all on the back!

Last week, I discovered a free educational clipart website run by Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse.



They have over 65,000 pieces of free clipart there! It's not cute, but it is useful! For my math curriculum, we only have the student workbooks and teacher manuals, no homework pages or tests, so I make everything myself. This was really useful to me this week when I made the second grade math test and needed clipart of base 10 blocks or bundles of 10s. It's not just math too... there are many different categories which I have not yet explored. But definitely check this out and bookmark it. :)
This post is part of The Clutter-Free Classroom's Week in Review linky party! I'm excited to share what I'm doing every week and also I'm excited to get new ideas! :)