Summertime Creations

I can't believe we only have a month until school starts again. This summer is going by way too fast. For me, the summers are all about making a little extra cash and catching up with all my teacher things. This summer I've started following some amazing blogs by some great teachers. One of my favorites has been:

Miss Nelson from Run! Miss Nelson's Got the Camera has some spectacular ideas for organization, decor, printables and so much more. When I saw her version of portable word wall cards, I knew I had to create some of my own. Here is her version to match her room decor:

and here is my version that I made today with a little help from Mrs. Messenger with Uniquely Yours Fonts and Abby from The Wizard of Boz. 

I love the chevron background and the blue and green will match my classroom's color scheme. Can't wait to print these out and get them ready for this year. 

I've been on quite a roll creating things for my TeachersPayTeachers store now that the afternoons (and most of the mornings) have been quite rainy. Here's some sneak peeks of other things I've made to get ready for my first year in second grade.

You can never be too organized as a teacher and these binder covers - featuring front binder design pages as well as cut outs to slip in the spine of the binder - are the perfect touch to add a little cuteness to all the paperwork. I also included all of the Common Core and state standards in a cuter font. This year our school is trying something new with just having two blocks in our schedules - one for reading and one for math. We are going to be including science into the reading block and merging social studies in with the math block. Hopefully these will help keep everything nice and organized. 

While I was on the creative roll I got to thinking about how I could improve some things that I did last year. One of the things that I found that I hated more than anything was copying, stapling, and grading morning work packets. I only did those for maybe a couple of months, but even checking 24 different morning journals each morning was enough for me to want to drive a pencil through my eye sockets (maybe not really, but it gets old really fast). So, in the hopes of saving my eye sockets and my nerves I created a Projectable Morning Work Pack. It's only seven slides for the whole year but because it uses the date to ask questions from, it is always changing. All I will do is project it on the board and students will work it out in their composition notebooks. Then, we will all go over it together as a class that morning. Here's a sample of some of the pages so you can see what I mean. 

What have you been up to this summer? Know any great teaching blogs I should check out? Let me know in the comments :)

- Courtney