Shopping to make items found on Pinterest

I recently got hooked on Pinterest when I was in Pennsylvania visiting a friend, who in her past life was a teacher. Since then I have found many great resources, especially since I am switching from social studies to writing and going  back into the classroom after a year and a half as a social studies coach. This week I am out of town in northern Virginia so that my children can attend an amazing ice hockey camp. So while they are at camp I went looking for some of the items needed to make some of the cool things I had pinned.

First stop was a teacher store. The closest one to me was in Burke called Teacher Mart. The wonderful sales clerk there worked with me for about an hour showing me different series of books since I teach 6th, 7th, and 8th grade writing. Here are the items I ended up getting:

 The main item I went looking for was a plan book. And I found the perfect one.

 The reason I wanted a plan book was because of this picture I pinned several weeks again.

I visited The Wise & Witty Teacher blog to see how and why she set it up this way. She is an elementary teacher who teachers several different subjects, but only one grade level. I on the other had teach one subject, but over several grade levels. I saw how she color coded by subject area and I thought I can do the same thing by grade level. Next I had to find one that would work with the centers I had created, which means I needed 18 spaces per day (6 per grade level). And I found it.Next stop was getting post-it notes. This is what my plan book now looks like on the inside.

I used the post-it page markers to color code the stations/centers at the top and then used small rectangular post-its to differentiate by grade level. I can't wait to start filling it in.

The next store to hit up was IKEA so I could get the hardware found at Create-Teach-Share's blog on her Boggle post.

 They didn't have the blue buckets, so I went with the frosted clear buckets. She plans to use this as an option for word work where the students just need to find as many words as they can. I teach middle school and want to take this one stop further. The students will need to write down the definition and part of speech for each word they find. I'm going to have this be an activity they can work on if they finish early and as an opportunity to earn extra credit. And if they can relate it back to one of their SOLs (Standards of Learning) in their other classes (social studies, science, or math), they will get more points. An example from the picture above would be EAST. In USI they have to be able to understand a compass rose. Another example would be SAP for 7th grade science. I hope the kids really get into it. I go back to work in less than 2 weeks and am looking forward to setting up this bulletin board.

Until next time.

Robyn