My students eat crayons!

Well,  at least that is the only explanation I can come up.  I always keep baskets of extra crayons on a shelf so that students can borrow what they need instead of asking me for them.  In past years I have keep the extra crayons separated by color families like reds, blues, greens, etc.  Like this:

This works okay, but when I ask students to use a red crayon sometimes they color it red violet or some other reddish color. 

That.

Makes.

Me.

Crazy.

I know it seems silly, but on our math tests sometimes I ask students to color one shape green and something else yellow and they grab a yellow green crayon for both.  So when I grade it I'm thinking  "what is that supposed to be?  Surely my little darling did it correctly and just thought they were using two different colors, right?  Right.  Well...."  And it goes on and on.  Maybe I'm too picky, or nuts, but I can't stand it. 

Anyways, back the story.  I decided to sort out the ACTUAL colors into smaller containers.  So, only "red", not scarlett, red violet (or violet red- seriously, is crayola trying to make teachers go crazy?)  This is what I ended up with:

So, obviously, the only logical explanation is that my students eat crayons.  
Okay, maybe not, but geeezzzz!  What am going to do now?  Two black crayons and some little brown fragments.  Do I buy the cheap packs of 24 crayons for the 7 or 8 colors I need or buy the more expensive 8 packs. Bummer.  I decided to leave them on the floor of my classroom and decided what to do another day.
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I did manage to get some other things accomplished today.  Here is what I did to my white board today.  The Rockstar section will have a cutout (maybe guitars or stars, I haven't decided) with each students name.  This is where they will start each morning. 
Our school-wide behavior program has paws that students start with and they lose if they make unfortunate decisions during the day.  At the end of each quarter, we have a party for students that have enough paws left.  That is what the paws lost section will be used for- students will have to move their paws into the corresponding box when they lose paws.  I also made a box for the date and day of the week, obviously.  
I used the decorative tape I got from Walmart (for $.88) to make the boxes and then cut out the words with my silhouette machine.  I'm really happy with how it turned out, except I think I might make the "paws lost" bigger, but maybe not.  

Oh yeah, and see the border?  I put magnets on the back of it so that I can easily move it or take it off. 

Here is my headphone storage idea.  I was going wait to blog about this until it was finished, but I won't be able to finish it up until I get pictures of my kiddos, and I thought someone might want to do something similar before school starts.  I use my Silhouette machine to cut out iPod shapes (because we're rockstars, remember?) and I plan to put a picture of each child inside of the rectangle and then laminate them.  I bought magnetic chip clips at the Dollar Tree to hang them.  Students will drape their earbuds over the clip to keep them tangle-free.  Last year, I was ready to pull my hair out because every time students got out their earbuds they were a tangled mess.  And guess who got to do the untangling??? 

I'm really hoping this will keep them accessible an ready to use at all times.  They are on the side of my filing cabinet- I put some on each side.  

Do you have a brilliant idea for headphone storage?  I would love to know how others stay organized.

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I also want to say a big THANKS to Courtney from Teaching in Paradise for my prize.  I won her 100 follower giveaway and it came today!  I was so excited to get some mail.  Thanks again, Courtney, and congrats on 100 followers!

I don't know why it is sideways.  I give up. 

Have a great evening!

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The Dot

Our story this week in our reading series was one of my favorites, The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds.  We did several different activities for this story, including the one I'm going to talk about today.  (I hope to post later this weekend about the writing we did to go along with the story.  They turned out so cute!)

Today, we took some time to make numbers sentences during our math time.  The kids didn't look overly enthused when I gave them this news until I said the magic word.....STICKERS!  I gave each students a sheet of large dot stickers and one sheet of mini dots.  I started out by making up a story about our students of the day that went something like this:  "Princess Pea (not her real name ;-) ) had two hair bows, then her sister gave her three more bows.  How many bows does she have now?"  The students put two stickers on the paper and then drew a line straight down.  I taught them to draw a line straight down when drawing addition pictures to help my little lovelies know where their plus sign belongs.  After the line straight down they added three more stickers to the other side.  Then, we wrote our number sentence.

We did the first two problems together and then I turned them loose.  They LOVED this activity!  As I walked around the room it was so cute overhearing them talking to themselves.  Even though I didn't tell them they had to make up stories to go along with their pictures, almost every student was doing just that. When we planned this activity I assumed they would use up all their stickers before they even got the page filled.  Boy, was I wrong!  I ended up making a quick run to office so that they could all have a second paper.  Apparently, stickers are so special that they wanted to stretch out the fun time.  

It was nice to take a day off from our regular math routine.  Did you do any fun Friday math activities?

And guess what finally arrived at the end of the day today????? The Cameo I ordered- I'm sooooooo beyond excited!  I can't wait to start making stuff for my classroom.  Once I figure this thing out I think I'll have a giveaway, so stay tuned!  Feel free to pass on any great ideas you have for it! (and please ignore the messy, messy table)

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