One Last Hurrah and Your Chance to Win!

One last hurrah...

My Donor's Choose proposal for 2 Nooks ends tomorrow.  I would *love* to get this funded and this is my last ditch effort!  If you have unused DC $$ from a project that didn't get funded or any gift cards with no project to donate to... those Nooks would love to find their way to room 108!  HERE is my project if you'd like to help (or know anyone else who would...!)

This week I have been asked to speak to some new teachers who have been hired in my county and I am so excited to share with them the collaborative "Tips and Tricks Handbook" that you all helped me create earlier this summer.  I have re-opened the link to the Google Doc, so if you have a first day/week tip to share with new teachers, please add it to the doc.  I will be closing the doc on Monday so I have time to format and upload the revised handbook!  Click HERE to access it.

I'm down to just two weeks left of summer vacation... and really once since I have PD next week.  I'm so excited about starting school and have been busy creating things for my classroom. 

My latest creation set out to simply be a set of word cards organized by month for my writing center... and then I added a page with birthday words... and then came food words... and animal words... until I had a collection of over 30 different word wall posters for each month of the year and tons of other things too!

Would you like to win a set?  Just leave a comment and I'll pick a random winner tomorrow morning while I sip my coffee and listen to "The Golden Girls" in the background!

Check out the file on TpT          or          Teacher's Notebook

I'll be working on school at home today... finishing some organization and starting to think about what we'll be doing the first day or so!  I know lots of you are back already... blogs are taking a backseat to "back-to-school mode"!  Just about the time you all are back in your routine and starting to blog again... I'll be starting school and I won't be around to see it!

Happy Sunday!

Water Cycle Crowns and Donor's Choose Good News!

On Thursday we made these water cycle crowns.  This was one of those "quick-I-found-this-and-we-have-to-do-it" kind of activities.  I found something similar to this in one of my Mailbox Magazine science books but just changed it a smidge.

We used sentence strips to make the crown, wrote "sun's heat, evaporation, condensation, precipitation" around it and used and foam weather stickers that I had left over from last year on each section.

They turned out super cute and we had fun explaining the water cycle with our bracelets and our crowns!

And now for my Donor's Choose good news... I have been completely overwhelmed and amazed at the support my classroom families showed this week when I sent home a letter explaining how Donor's Choose was matching funds this week.  I sent the note home on Monday and, by the time I got home from school on Monday, one of my two projects had already been funded.  The first is for some math computer games from Lakeshore Learning.

Tonight my other project for 2 Nook 8GB Tablets and 2 cases was fully funded as well!  Grandparents, parents, my in-laws, and even one of my students chipped in to help bring the Nooks to my classroom!  I was reminded this week what a wonderful community I teach in and how lucky I am to have such great classroom families!

I can't WAIT to receive the Nooks!  I have grand plans for them and I know my kiddos will be so psyched too!  I wasn't there today, so I will have to wait until Monday to spread the good news to them.

Hooray for Donor's Choose & TpT News!

Well, their donation doubling has officially begun!

I sent a note home with my kiddos to put a bug in parents' ears and one of my two projects is already funded only 3 hours after dismissal!  So, now we're getting some new computer games from Lakeshore for our student computers and for us to use together with the LCD/Mimio Pad combo (which is AMAZING!).

I am SO hoping my Nooks project gets funded this week too!  If anyone has gift cards laying around and are looking for a project to put them on... I'm your girl!  :)  If you are donating to anyone this week, be sure to do it via their "Giving Page" and enter the code BLOOM when you check out.

I have also just finished adding a bunch of files to my new Teachers Pay Teacher's shop... and *as soon as I can learn how!* I'll be having a "Grand Opening" sale!  Figured it out!  20% off until Friday!  I have about 50 items up...

We just started our weather/water cycle unit today so I'll be posting some pics later!  Tomorrow Steven Courtney is coming to give a concert at my school at 1:00pm.  If you don't know who he is... you must find out!  He's a super fun, energetic kids' musician who just plain ol' ROCKS!

We're currently under a tornado watch, so I'm a bit creeped out!  Time for me to camp out in front of the TV to make sure I can be kept abreast of new and sinister weather... happy Monday!

Lunch Bunch- Whaaaaat?!

I recently received an e-mail from a teacher wondering what in the world my "lunch bunch" is that I do on Fridays and I thought you might like to hear about it as well!

"Lunch Bunch" is when students who have earned the privilege to come, can bypass the cafeteria and eat their lunch with me in our classroom on Friday.

Yes.  Earn the privilege.

To be able to come, you can either be directly invited by me OR you can do one of the following:
*make some kind of amazing, wonderful, stellar choice
*fill in one side of the AR test log sheet (they write down the tests they've taken and their scores)
*complete a level in the 100 Club
*write up to an increment of 500 on number scrolls (500, 1000, 1500, 2000, etc...)

When a student earns the right to come, I give them a sticky note and they write their name on it and put it on the "Lunch Bunch" poster on our bathroom door.

Here is the sign I made at Vistaprint last summer...

And here it is being used by my Lunch Bunchers...  I'll have tons of friends in for lunch this Friday!

We love "Lunch Bunch".  It gives us a time to eat and have conversation together, work on manners, laugh, and just get to know each other better.  We get to talk about all sorts of random things and, as an adult, nothing is sweeter or more hilarious than listening to conversations between 1st and 2nd graders!

Last year I also had two girls that I ate lunch with every Wednesday in the classroom.  These two girls worked on social skills with me while we dined together.  It was kind of a "fake" situation that I created for one of the girls to be able to make a friend- inviting the one that needed the social skills and the other who I thought could be a good friend to her, and it worked really well!  I plan to begin this with one of my sweeties this week too.  Eating together with kiddos is a very non-threatening way to truly get some good conversation in and work on manners and social skills!

My kiddos get so excited and work so hard to get to come to "Lunch Bunch".  I have one who has taken over 100 AR tests this year (13 gets you "Lunch Bunch") because she just wants to come and eat with me!  She's got sticky notes up on the chart for the next three or four weeks out!

So, if you are able, you should try it!  If you need an incentive for something in your classroom, this is a good one.  And it's a super great way to build community, work on manners and socializing skills, and just have fun with your kiddos!

And, just because, here's a copy of my AR log.  They keep these in their folders in their Daily Five book boxes and just come show me when one side is filled up.  When the whole thing is full, I file it away.  We love pulling them out to see how many tests we've taken!  :)  Now, I don't love AR and that is a totally different rant blog post, but if I have to do it, at least I can enjoy hanging with my kiddos!

On a side note, I just posted a project on Donor's Choose that I would LOVE to have funded!  I've had loads of luck with Donor's Choose thanks to extremely generous people- some who I know and others who are strangers!  I know sometimes they send out random gift cards (my mom got $125.00 in gift cards from them once that she posted to one of my projects!) or offer special promos to earn credits to put towards projects... if you have some laying around and don't currently have a project to fund, I'd love it if you would keep me in mind!  :)  I put a project up to get a Mimio Pad of my own so I don't have to worry about the possibility of potentially having to share the ActivSlate that I'm using in my room!  Yes, I'm being selfish!  This would get me my very own interactive pad so I could ensure being able to keep one in my room at all times!  Anyway, here's a link to my giving page if you do happen to have any codes or unused gift cards- Mrs. Bainbridge's Donor's Choose Giving Page.

I love you, Donor's Choose!

This summer I had four projects funded on Donor's Choose and the materials for three of them arrived today!

We got...

Geometry, measurement, and graphing activities for our math workstations!


The first two sets of "Math Start" books (for some reason, my picture won't load... so that pic is from the Lakeshore Learning Website)

And... everyone's favorite was this box full of classroom board games! So many kids haven't played "Operation" or "Guess Who" which were mainstays for me and my sister when we were younger! And what a fun way to develop social skills for my kiddos... what could be better than learning how to take turns and lose gracefully while pulling a plastic funny bone out of a man's elbow all while being terrified his nose will light up and he'll buzz at you?!

My 4th project that got funded is for tons of "boy" books for my library! I'm hoping those will be coming any day now!

I have had 22 projects funded in all since 2008! You can check out my Donor's Choose page by clicking here to see some of the things I've gotten for my classroom! :) I currently have one project up for some science materials but I have tons of "points" left and would love to get something else up there. What things have you had success with? What are some of your favorites that you've gotten? I'd love to hear about it... especially if you have tips for funding! I have a very generous friend who greatly supports learning in my classroom on Donor's Choose... but I'd love to hear other ways to get funded too!

Donor's Choose

Do your students ever randomly say things like, "Raise your hand if you like cookies", "Raise your hand if you like things that are pink"?  My kids do that all the time!  I love to listen to their conversations during free time and hear things like that.  :)

So, here's mine for you... Raise your hand if you LOVE Donor's Choose?  Can you see my hand up and frantically waving?  I LOVE IT!

I had two more projects funded this past week by a high school friend who has funded many projects for me over the last two years.  I'm so excited to be adding several graphic novels and comic books that are full of "boy" themes and a set of different board games to my classroom!

Last year I added many comic books and graphic novels to my classroom and, during my search for them, was amazed at how many there actually are that are appropriate for a lower elementary classroom.  Now even books like The Boxcar Children have been made into graphic novels to entice kids to read.  I just think it's awesome!  Donor's Choose had partnered with Townsend Press who funded 50% of my project for the books.  I believe you had to order books from the AKJ Books, Inc. catalog to get the funding bonus.  So, if you haven't done that yet, head over to Donor's Choose and get yourself a project for some books!  I don't know if the 50% match is still going on, but it's worth a try!

The second project that got funded was for board games and came from having a "game day" with my students at the end of the year.  So many of them just couldn't lose gracefully, be patient in taking turns, or even patient enough to sit through an entire game!  It occurred to me that, in this world of video games and instant gratification, they just don't have any experience playing games collaboratively or interacting with plastic pegs and pieces of paper money!  So I'm getting Clue, Trouble, Battleship, Guess Who, Candy Land, and Operation!

I have one more project up right now that still needs quite a bit of funding.  It's getting ready to expire, so I'm not holding my breath... does anyone know if I will get a "credit" for the current level of funding it has received that I could apply to a different project?

My next goal is to buy a Lite-Brite for my classroom... I was thinking it would be a great way for kids to practice making arrays!  Does anyone know if they still make old school Lite-Brites?  I figure a project for a $20.00 Lite-Brite is a little silly, so finding one is my quest for this summer.  I haven't gotten very far in my Debbie Diller "Math Stations" book, so I don't know if this would be appropriate for a multiplication and division work station... but the idea has me so excited!

I guess that's it for today... enjoy the holiday weekend!