Monday Make-It - August 11

Well, another week has flown by - getting that much closer to my month off.  I have been busy making things for my room, so I am linking up with Tara.  I love Monday Make-It, it keeps me creative and inspired.

I take a lot of pictures when I go to Disneyland.  So since my classroom is Disney theme this year - I decided to make a memory game with some of the pictures.

This was super easy to do.  I printed doubles of each picture at 4 x 6, then put a piece of 4 x 6 scrapbook paper on the back. This set has the black polka dots on the back.  Laminate the photos and you have a great memory game for free centers.  

I am going to make one set with just the princesses using a different scrapbook paper, so they don't get mixed up.  I can add more picture cards to each group, when I feel my little ones are ready for it.

 A set with pictures of the kids would be a great beginning of the year center. 

This center was inspired by Jennifer at First Grade Blue Skies.  I have used the little photo albums before in my classroom, but it got me all inspired with the possibilities.  I made my own set of letter printing practice flashcards using a Disney theme, of course.

I made a set of uppercase and lowercase letters, then put them into two albums.  This way, I can have two students at a time in the center, then they can switch the albums

My head is swimming with different ideas for these albums.  

You can find it HERE

I, finally, finished my ABC small books - it was a year in the making.  My little ones did the books last year, but I needed to finish putting them together in a packet.  There are 24 books, because X, Y and Z are in one book.  My kids loved them.

You can find it  HERE

Have a great week and thanks for stopping by.  If you go back to work this week, I wish you calm days.

Monday Make-It - August 4

I finished my first month of school, whew.  It has been a challenging month, but we made it.  It seems like that I have been doing lots of creating to balance my busy class, but not a lot of projects getting finished.  My hubby says that I have been brain spinning, a lot.  We went to Disneyland, yesterday, for some stress release and I came home with 4 new project ideas.

I am linking up with 4th Grade Frolics to share a couple of the projects that I finished this week.

My classroom is a Disney theme, this year - so you will be seeing a lot of Mickey stuff in my room.

I wanted to add plants to my classroom, but I wanted the pots to be cute.

These pots are on the bigger size, 8 inches (I think).  I found everything that I needed for this project laying around in my house, except for the plants.

I painted the outside of the pot white, first.  Then, painted the red or black on - the red and black paint covers better with a base of white.  The polka dots were made with a polka dot sponge that I got at Hobby Lobby, a while ago.

I sealed them with Mod Podge, because I didn't want to go buy a sealer.  It worked great.

I love the way they turned out.

I went to Home Depot before school to buy the plants.  Apparently, when you buy a plant sometimes they include a free lizard as a bonus.  I was putting one of the plants in the pot, 2 hours after I bought it, and there was a lizard on one of the leaves.  I might have let out a little scream, okay, a big scream.  I am so thankful, it didn't decided to leave the plant when I was driving.

I am loving this next project.  It was so much fun to make.  It is a great way to recycle all the stuff that we having laying around the house.  The only thing that I bought were some extra pompoms.  I made one as a sample and my 20 month old grandson played with it for 15 minutes.  Then, he hid it from me - so he could play with it later, lol.  I am going to make him and the twins a set - I guess I need to drink more water.

I made 12 color sensory bottles.  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, white, gray, brown, black and rainbow.

The key is to only fill them up a little more than halfway.  If, you fill them all the way then you can't see all the goodies inside.

Here is a sample of what I put in my yellow bottle. The plastic eggs and paper clips I got from the Dollar Store, earlier in the year.  The ribbon was left over from my center leis.  The flowers are from my scrapbooking bin.  I have a huge container of buttons.

I made sorting mats with the color words, so after they played with them - they could sort by color word.

I made a packet of the directions, photos of all the bottles and the sorting mats.  You can find it here for free.

The next make-it was a result of our trip to Disneyland, yesterday.  I was inspired by this.

A whole wall of Jelly Bellies. They started to look like little pompoms.  I discovered that they had different mixes.  My favorite was this.

A Mickey Mouse mix of jelly bellies.  Which led to this.

After, I had my nap - I went to the Party store and bought some confetti packs to add to the bottle.  It didn't take very much, still have a bunch left.  The crystal Mickeys are from a sticker sheet, the kind that is on plastic.  I left it attached to the plastic and cut around them.

My finished Mickey sensory bottles.  My dad saved the little bottles for me, perfect size for the grand kids.

Have a great week, I'm going to make more bottles - Disney style.