Monday Made it/Made 4 Math Monday- Repurposed desk calendar & note set

Today I am linking up with Tara at 4th Grade Frolics for her Monday Made It and @druinok for Made 4 Math Monday.  I am excited to see what everyone has been busy creating.

Years ago my mom (make that Santa) gave me a Susan Winget Desk Calendar and Note Set made by Lang.  On top there was a calendar.  I don't even remember if it was daily, weekly, or monthly.  It's been that long.  Well, being the packrat thoughtful saver that I am, I never threw it out because I had lots of notes left in it.  This has set next to the phone in our kitchen for the last 6 yrs it appears (saw the copyright date on the set was 2006 which means I used it for 2007, which means it's been sitting around since circa 2008).

Last summer when I purchased my Martha Stewart chalkboard paint I had visions of painting the top of this black (it was white after the calendar was taken off, sorry I don't have a before shot, I was too eager to start painting).  Instead it sat near the phone waiting for me to repurpose it so it could join me back in my classroom.

This was the quickest and easiest project ever.  I did maybe 4-5 coats of the paint, making sure to let it dry completely between coats. The directions say one hour between coats, I may have been a bit more impatient than that.  This morning I "conditioned" it with a piece of sidewalk chalk I found buried under various bikes and LAX sticks in the garage.  It's not like I have any nice clean pieces of chalk laying around.  I'm happy to tell you the chalk served the purpose.

After a few coats of chalk (which I wiped off with an old dishtowel) I used the chalk markers to free hand my design (as you can tell LOL).  This one was easy peasy lemon squeezy.  I urge you to try out chalk markers for yourself.  They are so fun.  I ordered mine on Amazon last year.  I have used them on my chalkboard and windows at school and they clean of nicely. Not sure how this will come off the chalkboard paint, but if I decide to change it I'll let you know how it worked.

Finished product.  LOVE it!

I used a foam brush, paper plate, and the chalkboard paint and markers

Here's my random chalk I used to condition it with chalk

After wiping the chalk off

It's true, I do <3 math!

Can't wait to bring this baby back to my classroom

Made 4 Math Monday- Homemade Whiteboards

Well I have finally been able to get into my classroom and start setting it up.  I worked there Friday 10-4:30 and today 9:00-7:30.  I did go out to lunch both days and take a break to drop off my oldest at football practice.  I must say that I will not spend as much time as I did today because I was cranky and hungry by the time I got home tonight. I did accomplish quite a few things, but my room really looks like a disaster at the moment. Pictures will be coming soon.

I laminated some tagboard and then put duct tape around the edges for my homemade whiteboards.  The first picture shows what it looked like when I wrote on it.  The second picture shows what it looked like after I cleaned it. Putting the duct tape on was not easy and if you look closely you would see that I did not do a very good job.  I do not think I am cut out for using duct tape after this little experiment.  I am not sure how well these whiteboards will hold up.  I a cheap generic dry erase marker to test this out so I am not sure if an Expo marker would clean up better.

TA DA!  I will not let the duct tape control me.

After I cleaned it.

I will let you know how these hold up once students start using them.  

Made 4 Math Monday- Printing on Post-It Notes

I finally have something to share today for Made 4 Math.  Yesterday instead of cleaning my bedroom closet like I should have, I started playing around with trying to figure out how to make a template to be able to print directly onto post-its.  I have seen such cute ideas of printing on post-its, but none really applied to what I would use in my classroom.

After a couple hours of trial and error and several wasted post-its, I achieved success.  I am so excited at the endless possibilities of being able to print on post-its.  I plan on printing out some post-its for formative assessment and math workshop.  I will be sure to post photos of what I do.

This is the template I created in Power Point.  I basically created a 3x3 square using the shape tool (although PP would not let me create a perfect 3x3 but it was close enough.  Make sure you duplicate that slide a few times so you do not have to start over when you mess up your squares (and mess up I did, several times!).  Once you have your page ready to print you must go back and get rid of the lines on the slide you are printing by putting no fill and no line.  This is very important or the lines will show up on your post-it.  Now if you made your square big enough so it won't print on the post-it then you won't have to worry.

Place your post-its on top of your template and then print away.  Do not forget to delete the line and fill from your square you made.

 Below is an example of three different post-its I made.  The one on the left could be if you wanted to collect the "I notice" "I wonder" feedback from your students.  The middle one is what I plan on posting on top of the student info packets at Back to School Night.  It's hard for them to see their names on the schedule they get so hopefully this will help.  Then they can write the name and spelling they prefer (that way anything I make for the first day for them will be with the name they want).  Then I thought it would be fun to introduce "I notice" and "I wonder" that night to students and get some quick feedback that I can use to answer questions during the first day orientation, this will be a perfect intro to a technique we will be using in math class.  I feel that this post-it will give each student a chance to ask about something they are wondering.  The last one is just a Top Six To-Do List of the most important things that need to get done that day.

I am so excited at the possibilities of what I can print on post-its!  I am no printable expert so if I can figure this all out on my own I'm sure you can too!  If you make something be sure to leave a link in the comments.  I would love to check it out.

Made 4 Math/Monday Made It- Classroom passes

This past year I decided to make some new passes for my classroom.  I had them coordinate with my pink, lime, blue color scheme.  I loved the way they turned out and laminated some extra so when they got all bent and curled from students manhandling them I could just throw them away and had new passes ready to go.

When a student gets called to the Main Office or Guidance Office they just grab the pass out of the bucket on my desk.  We use the Blue House passes during our last period of the day called Home Base.  During this time students are allowed to go to any teacher to get help.  For the encore teachers the students have the fill out a digital pass in advance and they don't even come to my classroom.  I check the digi pass list (on google as everything is at my school).  If students want to get help or need to see one of the other core house teachers (science, social studies, language arts) they just let me know and grab a blue house pass.  

I just realized that I could do a whole blog post on passes because in addition to those shown above we also have laminated library passes, yellow passes that have to be filled out, and student planner passes that the students fill out and teacher just initials.  Sometime this fall I will do a blog post dedicated to explaining our pass policies at the middle school.  

Here are some sneak peeks at a few upcoming projects I have in the works for Monday posts.  I assure you these projects are no further along than the photos I am posting today.  I feel by putting the pictures up it might motivate me to follow through on these projects I have had in the works for months (and some even years).

Please click on the links below the photos to join either of this great Monday link parties!

#Made4Math

4th Grade Frolics

Math Focus Wall Photos-Updated

I wanted to share some recent photos I took of my Math Focus Wall.  I apologize for not posting these photos sooner as I feel I have been promising to post them since school started, but it really has been a busy year thus far.  Thank goodness for break and some time for me to blog!

The evolution of my Math Focus Wall has been a work in progress from my creative thought process and planning last school year to the background design seen in this post:  The First Sneak Peek  and the original design seen here: Take 1.

TA DA!  I think I am finally happy with it

After a few months of school and actually using the wall with my students I realized that I needed to have two separate sides to reflect the two different courses I teach.  On the left is the board for my accelerated math 7 class and the right side is for the three sections of math 7 I teach.  

Accelerated Math 7

Math 7

I also changed up some things to make the board work for our class needs.  It specifies the CC 

standards, lesson, topic, and student objectives for each day, as well as, the Mathia pacing expectation for that week (that is what unit students should be on in our computer program).  The poster on the top left of the board is the Mathematical Practice Standards and as you can see I still need to get my Problem Solving Strategies Posters on the top right.

You can see Math Vocabulary to the left of the Focus Wall

Creating a Math Focus Wall was a major goal of mine for the 2012-2013 school year and I am very happy with and proud of how it turned out.  It was a lot of working putting the wall up this summer.  I am also finding it very time consuming to have to create all the posters that go up and can change daily.  I use sentence strips for the goals and lesson topics, but it is easier to print out the common core standards and lesson information.  

Of course this will all be done for next year, but this year it is a ton of work.  I try to create everything in advance for the chapter so it is all ready to go.  I like to make sure the focus wall is done for the next day so I don't have to worry about it in the morning when I get to school.  I did not realize how labor intensive this all would be because we can do three to five different lessons per week and when the lesson changes so does the focus wall.  I do feel it is worth the effort to have this information prominently displayed for students around the SMARTBoard which we use daily.

What it looked like on a different day

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have about the math focus wall.  #made4math

#Made4Math A few random things

This will be a quick post to share a few things I made today.  I realized that I have had a to do list of things I have been wanting to make on the computer since school started.  As is always the case, once school starts the things I want to do/make get replaced by the day to day minutiae of keeping a classroom running:  the planning, teaching, grading, reteaching, retaking, lather, rinse, repeat.

Seating charts/class lists binder

Vocabulary for word wall and CCSS posters

Math Focus Wall Labels

I finally was able to print out some new labels for my math focus wall.  I will be posting photos of the new and improved focus wall soon.  I have changed up what it looks like from what I had at the beginning of the year as I have seen what works and what could be improved.

After school I finished up my CC standards posters for The Number System domain (we are currently working on).  I also finished writing up the vocabulary words and will laminate them and the posters tomorrow.

Daily and Class Files

Good Monday morning.  I did not have a time to post again this weekend because my weekend was crazy busy, with  a blissful massage Saturday morning followed by a quick trip to Barnes & Noble and my favorite bakery to pick up my son's bday cake.  Two youth football games on Saturday, one at 2:30 PM and the other at 7 PM.  I am happy to say both were victories.  It rained through the entire 7th grade game.  Boo!

Sunday we were supposed to have two fall ball games at 8 and 10 AM, but they were cancelled due to the previous two night's rain.  That proved to be quite a blessing because my husband was around to help with getting the house ready for Cooper's 7th birthday party.  We started the day a quick run to the grocery store and then Dunkin Donuts for the birthday breakfast.  I spent the rest of the morning making food for his family birthday party which started at 1 PM.

The party was great.  He loved hanging out with his brothers and cousins.  The five of them get along so well and have such a great time when they are together.  We also watched the craptastic Packer game.  The party ended around 3:30, as my nephew had a fall BB game to get to, but my parents stayed for dinner.  My mom and I ran to JoAnn's and I got some Crayola poster markers I'm excited to try out.  I seem to have an obsession with buying markers lately.

Now for my Made for Math Monday.  I have two file sorters that I place back to back on my desk.  One sorts any handouts for absent students.  Students know to check these files anytime they are absent to see if they missed any important information.  This year I jazzed up my folders a bit to fit with my zebra theme.  They turned out OK, not my fave, but they will do for now.  I have assigned each class a color so when I make a list, or seating chart I use that color to keep things coordinated and so I can easily tell what class I am looking at.  So far I am loving the color coded classes.

My new class hour files with a little zebra.

This is where papers get filed for any absent students.

I have previously posted about my Daily Files and you may have previously seen them posted at Pinterest.  I just wanted to add them to this MFMM post to keep them in one place.

Day files for any handouts or lesson plan materials.

The digital kit is Pi Are Squared by Libby Pritchett.

Check out lots of other great M4MM, hashtag #made4math on Twitter.

Classroom Door-Made 4 Math Monday

I was really hoping to have my Math Focus Wall all finished for today's M4MM, but alas I have a few more elements to finish up.  It will definitely be good to go for next week's M4MM so if you are looking to see the finished product make sure you stop back next Monday.  I am so thrilled with how it is looking and can't wait to share it with all of you.

I did finish my classroom door today.  A couple of years ago I decided to do one door design to keep up for the whole school year instead of changing things by month/season to save myself a lot of time and trouble.  I purchased a new border set because it gets a bit beaten up by the students entering and leaving the classroom (and when the door is open and someone leans against it).

I love my door and thinks it sets the tone I want for my classroom of a fun learning zone where math rules.  Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite cartoon ever and I posted a few cute back to school comics.

Welcome to my happy place, Room 407!

I've shared this tip before, and it really comes from my friend Linda's husband.  Did you follow that?  Tape yarn or string to help you line up letters.  Easy peasy and works like a charm.

Lining up the letters.

A very simple way to spruce up a store bought border or letters is to put some fun stickers on them.  Here I used some sparkly star stickers.

This is the window to my classroom that is left of my door.  I spy a Math Focus Wall in the background.

And followed the star theme on the posters and border.  I love the way it adds sparkles and ties all the elements of the door together.

Love this poster.

Hope you enjoyed this M4MM post.  I would love to see how you decorate your classroom door.  Please leave a link in comments if you have a photo and I promise to check it out.