Did you put your name?

As I'm sure all teachers know, there are little kiddos who love to turn their papers in with no name. Since I see about 100 students everyday, I don't have time to play detective. I saw this GENIUS idea on Pinterest...

http://mrswilliamsonskinders.blogspot.com/search/label/management

I know that kids can not be the most observant of creatures at times so I had to come up with a way that they would see my highlighters. I took a spray painted can, put Velcro dots on the back and stuck it to the cabinet above their turn in tray, right at eye level. They walk to turn in their paper and BAM!!! THERE IS THIS THING IN FRONT OF MY FACE!! BETTER READ IT!!

I literally had zero no name papers after this. The kids loved it for multiple reasons.

#1- the highlighters made loud noises in the can and they just thought that was awesome.
#2- there were so many colors to choose from!!! which leads me to...
#3- there were so many colors to choose from.

One day, the kids were to take their test, turn it in and go back to their seats to read. People are doing their thing, highlighting their names, turning their papers in and going to sit down. After a while, I look up and someone is still over there with the highlighter. I said "WHAT ARE YOU DOING DUDE?!"

He was making a pretty rainbow of colors on his name, making colorful outlines, different colors for each letter, just really enjoying my highlighters.

So there are pros and cons :)

Command Center

This is something that I saw and thought it might be a bit too excessive for my house but might work perfect for my desk at school. It's a super cute idea, here it is...

Genius, right?! So I took the idea, skipped to Target to get it, and filled it with my own goodies and it's been on my desk for a year now. It's perfect and fills my teacher heart with gleeeeeeeeeeeee.


Here is my lovely command center...

It's the little things that can get teachers excited!!
Check out the original command center here!

Bulletin Board

For the past 3 years, I've used my big bulletin board as a word wall for my vocab words. As the years have gone on, I've realized that it's hard to keep up with putting all the weekly words up and I was ready for a change.

I saw this bulletin board on Pinterest and LOVED it!!

At the time I saw this, it was the end of the year and my creativity was fried. I had about zero brain power left to tweak it into something with my own flair but I was ready to change my board, so I did. I cut out and glued all the designs by hand and that only took about....hmmmmm....forever.

I like my final product and I plan to keep it up the first 1/4 of the year so that will give me time to hopefully come up with something creative of my own for my earth science section.

Voila!

Here is the link to the original bulletin board
http://thesciencelife.blogspot.com/2012/07/bulletin-boards-galore.html