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Teacher Down-Time

What do you do to relax when you get a break from teaching? I know that it helps me a lot to do activities that have nothing to do with teaching sometimes. This helps me to recharge and I have more energy to give to my students when I return to work.

This Thanksgiving Break, when I was not with family and eating turkey, I worked on creating a playroom for my grandson in our house.

I love crafting and painting, so this was really fun for me. This room had been my son's room and then it was my craft room. We are now in the process of creating a "She Shed" in a shed outside for my craft room since we decided to make a playroom for Benjamin.

Here are some pictures:

I am planning to cover the top 3 shelves on the left with fabric to hide those bins. I still need to add cars to the black "road".

My husband was a drag racer for years, so I am going to add pictures of his race cars on the black "drag strip" on this wall. I also need to add the "B" to the alphabet. The larger letters in the alphabet are for the first initials of the people in our family.

Here are some close-up pictures of the word BEN in the room. I got this idea from Pinterest (of course):

These letters are about 18 inches tall. They are from Hobby Lobby ($3.50 each).

I cut up white stickers for the roads.

Then, I used hot glue to attach the cars. I used Command velcro to hang them on the wall.

I hope everyone got some time to relax this holiday break.

Pencil Parking

This year, I have had a pencil dilemma.

This is my 21st year of teaching and I have never had this problem. I have always just put out pencils in the supply buckets at each table. I would put out new pencils as we needed them, but it wasn't very often. Each year, I always had a surplus of pencils left.

Luckily, I had a lot of extra pencils left from last year, because this year, the pencils in my room have been disappearing.

I teach two different blocks of students. I'm not exactly sure where the pencils are going, but over 100 of them have gone missing. 

So, I have been searching for a solution.For a couple of weeks, I had a sign out sheet for the pencils, but it was taking too much time to have the kids sign out a pencil and return it at the end of class, since I was having to monitor it.

I looked online at Really Good Stuff and I found this amazing pocket chart.

I wrapped each pencil with washi tape and numbered them. I gave each student a number. Now, at the beginning of each block, I quickly pass out the pencils. I have a student collect the pencils at the end of each block and we make sure all the pencils are returned. I have been using this system for a week and it is working very well.

If you are having a pencil problem, I highly recommend this pocket chart (or something similar).