Destination: Summer Vacation!

Today I'm linking up with my buddy Krista for her very first linky party! Yay!

Sadly, I am not a well-traveled person. However, that means I just love everywhere I go! I'm not picky. :)

Here are some favorite destinations of mine...

{Lake Geneva, Wisconsin}

Lake Geneva is a lovely little town not too too far from where I live. It is bit tourist-y, so it has your normal ice cream shops and cafes and boutique type of places. But it also has a HUGE lake that you can boat on! There is also a Lake Shore Path around the entire lake that you can walk on. You go through people's huge backyards and it is just really wonderful. Every house can make the path look however they want to, and one house made a really nice paved path with a fence that is covered with inspirational quotations. Here is a picture from a trip that my boyfriend and I took up there a few weeks ago!

{Oceanside, California}

I have family in southern California and it is the most BEAUTIFUL PLACE EVER. I want to marry it. When I go there I can't stop staring at everything. So many plants and flowers. And so many hills!!! It is so incredibly flat here, and I didn't realize that until I was in California.

{Illinois Beach State Park - Zion, Illinois}

This is another semi-local place I like to visit, although I have not gone yet this summer!!!! :( I definitely do not swim at this beach because Lake Michigan is FREEZING but the beach is gigantic and a great place to picnic, read, and just chill.

So there is a theme to my favorite destinations......... water and the beach!! Here is how I feel about the beach:

Go link up with Krista! I want to know where you go. :)

Monday Made It: Crate and Drawer Storage

Hi friends! Happy Monday!

My Monday Made It is a little......... unfinished-looking today. Also my title for this project is not good... I think you'll understand what I mean though. :)

This week I made a crate and fabric drawer and shelf storage thingy for my class!

I was inspired by Stephanie at 3rd Grade Thoughts! Like her, I have an awkward space underneath my whiteboard in my room. This year it was occupied by my Even and Odd Street...

but next year I want to use the space productively. I don't have any in-classroom storage whatsoever. No built-in cabinets, no shelves, nothing. So this will give me some space to store things for Daily Five or whatevs.

The supplies were easy to get! I bought 4 crates at Target (they're on sale right now for $3!), I bought the fabric drawers at Aldi (2 for $5.99! WOW!), and I got the board at Menard's (it was around $7 or so in the lumber section of the store). The board measures... 1" by 12" by 72"... 1 inch thick, 12 inches wide, and 72 inches long. Or 6 feet, however you want to say it.

The crates are ziptied together. I haven't officially attached the board yet because I don't think I could get this contraption into my car if I did. :)

My random baskets are to show what will be there! I plan to buy legit baskets to put my little chalkboards in and my whisper phones and all that jazz.

The drawers will have my Listen to Reading materials, perhaps my Word Work materials, stuffed animals for the kids to read aloud to, and so on!

I am excited about this new storage option in my class!

Yay Meetup!

On Thursday, we had our Chicago blogger meetup! It was so super fun. We chatted and ate and had a great time! If you have a chance to go to a meetup where you live, don't be nervous. You should go and have fun!


Here's a picture of some of us!

Back row: Mel D (Seusstastic Classroom Inspirations), Nicole (Lesson Plan SOS), Lauren (Go Fourth and Inspire), Laura (Mrs. Castro's Class), me!, and Marie

Front row: Melissa (Lesson Plan SOS), Becky (Dots-n-Spots), Krista (The Second Grade Superkids), and Katie

Thank you Melissa, Nicole, and Becky for organizing the meetup, and thank you Mel for taking care of the picture for us!! I look super tan somehow... it must be the lighting. Definitely not that tan in real life. Haha!

And in other news.............. less than 6 hours until the Bachelorette finale! I am totally Team Arie. I mean, come on.

And speaking of Team Arie... if you are a real fan, you can buy a Team Arie shirt and 100% of the proceeds go to fighting drug and alcohol addiction. I think that is great!

Just a tip for you....... don't type in Team Arie dot com with no spaces........ you don't want to go there.

Happy Sunday!

Google Reader = Love

So the other day, I was on my way home from the Chicago blogger meetup with my buddies Laura and Krista when I found out that they didn't use Google Reader to read blogs.

This was crazy to me, because I really don't know how people can go though their lives without Google Reader. Seriously!

So let me tell you a bit about it. I actually started using it before I even read blogs. I was watching a technology webinar and they mentioned Google Reader. I don't even know what I was reading on it before blogs... but that is neither here nor there. :)

First, you have to have a Google account and be following blogs using Google Friend Connect. This sounds sort of complicated, but it's probably what you're already doing.

Next, if your Gmail window is open, look along the top of your window. You should see a "more" thing on the end. Click it!

Then you'll get a drop down. From there, pick Reader. It's right under Blogger!

Then it will open up Google Reader in a separate tab. All of your blogs should be there that you're already following using Google Friend Connect.

Here's what mine looks like right now! Only one unread. :)

If you want to read the post, click on All Items in bold on the left side and you'll see all of the posts in order of when they were posted by all of the bloggers that you follow. Kind of like the dashboard/reading list in Blogger, except Google Reader gives you the whole post instead of a snippet.

If you should happen to find a blog that doesn't have the Google Friend Connect following option, you can still use Google Reader to read their posts! Just click on the red Subscribe button and paste in the blog address. It will add it into the rest of your blogs!

If you want to comment on a post, you'll have to scroll back up to the post title. When you click on it, it will open the link in a separate tab or window so you can comment away!

What I love about Google Reader is that it keeps track of what you have read and haven't read. Also, if you are looking for resources for a specific topic or skill, you can just type what you're looking for into the Search Reader box toward the top of the page. For example, I just typed in "fact family" and I got 77 posts! Wow!

Also there's an app! So I peruse blogs when I'm just hanging out.

So it's pretty much awesome.

Do you use Google Reader and do you love it so much??

Oh, Baby! {Round Two}

So I don't really talk about this on my little bloggio, but I knit! Not all the time, and I very rarely actually finish something that I start knitting (which is a theme of my life basically)..... but I do knit.

A while back, I posted about a baby hat I knitted for one of my second graders' families. Toward the end of the year, one of my first graders came to school and proclaimed that her mom was having a baby.

After confirming this news, I decided to work on a blanket for el bebé! I just finished yesterday evening.

The pattern is very simple but I think it turned out really pretty! It is the Big Bad Baby Blanket pattern found in this book:

I am excited to gift this to my little lady. :) She is one of my lower income students, and she and her sister are 5 and 7, so I don't know if her mom has kept all of their baby stuff  I hope this blanket will help them out at least a tiny bit. :)

I feel like I am going to make 894987545 more of these blankets because my facebook has exploded with expectant moms!!

Syllables?! Help!

Okay, teacher friends. I need your help today.

Recently I came across this sweet blog called Two Can Do It.

It's awesome! They have a ton of free resources that I have been downloading like crazy.

I just downloaded their super cute Class Syllable Tally activity, which I'm planning on doing in the first week of school. I love that it is cute AND it focuses on syllables and tallies!

But I have a problem.

How many syllables are in the name Miles???

I had this amazing little guy last year in first grade and I will have him again in second. We legit had the SAME syllable conversation like 10 times over the course of the year when I'd call kids to line up by syllables.

You know... "If you have 2 syllables in your name, line up for P.E. If you have 4 syllables in your name, line up for P.E."

But every time Miles and I would talk back and forth about whether he had one or two syllables.

Miles? Or Mi-yuls?

I would love for you to vote on the sweet little poll I just made. Here it is!

How many syllables does the name "Miles" have?
	1
	2
pollcode.com free polls

My first week of school activity needs your help! :)

Monday Made It: Whisper Phones

Happy Monday! I had a great weekend, and I hope you did too!

This week, I finished a project that I started last year - DIY whisper phones!

I was inspired by Mrs. Saoud's tutorial, but I made a few tweaks along the way!

• When you pick out your 1/2" PVC pipe at the store, you'll want to ask a worker to cut it into 4.5" pieces unless you have someone at home who can do this. When I asked the Home Depot guy, he literally laughed in my face and said he'd only cut it into 2 pieces. However, I did not give up! I persisted, he got his manager, and his manager happily cut the PVC pipe! Lesson to you - perservere! :)
• I bought 1/2" elbows and I was just able to shove them onto the pipe. Just make sure you buy 1/2" PVC elbows - they will be white, not beige. No gluing necessary!  That PVC glue smells really bad, so you're welcome. 
• I spray-painted them with special spray paint for plastic stuff. It's Rust-Oleum Plastic spray paint. I don't know if this was really necessary... but it worked for me.

You can use these whisper phones during Read to Self for Daily Five, or for independent reading regardless of your classroom. You will have to teach them how to use them appropriately, otherwise they will scream into them or make them into a long telephone game..... not that this happened to me or anything. :)

My class last year loved these things. It really helped them focus on their reading and block out the outside distractions. It can be hard in my class to focus when I'm teaching half of the class and half are engaged in independent activities. So this was a big help! And the kids would ask to use them, which was great!

Also - if you want to save some money, you don't need to spray paint. I didn't paint mine last year and no one seemed to mind. :)

If you've been thinking of buying commercially-made whisper phones, this DIY alternative will save you a TON of money! And they are super durable!