Monday Made it!

Good Morning!! I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics for another Monday Made it linky party! Linking up every Monday definitely makes my Monday's so much better!

I have been wanting a color laser printer FOR.EV.ER. I even blogged about it a couple of months ago. It made me so jealous to read other blogs and see all of their colorful posters. task cards, etc. that they made and printed out for their classroom. After months and months of talking about it, drooling over it, and weighing pros and cons, I decided that I would check out the back to school sales to see if there were any good deals. Staples had a really good deal on an HP colorjet printer. It was originally $429 and was marked down to $299. Even though this was such a good deal, $299 was soooo much money for me to spend.

This is where my super amazingly awesome boyfriend comes in! I guess I must have been talking about it A LOT at home - Johnathan said that he would buy it for me as my early Christmas present! Ahhhhh! <3 So we drove to staples, picked it up and got an even better deal with the 15% coupon they gave us, and brought it home to set it up. I've been printing and printing all day long. Having it at home is even better than I imagined! The color is so crisp and it's great that I can print from my iPad and my MacBook Pro wirelessly. Best. present. ever.

Here she is!

I had to snapchat everyone my excitement!

Now that I had this awesome printer, I HAD to create something to print and laminate! I bought some $1 bins from the Target dollar spot and just dressed it up with some ribbon. I needed cute chevron labels to organize my classroom better.

I then bought some velcro stickies from Hobby Lobby so that I could change the labels on my bins whenever I needed to.

And voila! Interchangeable labels for my classroom!

Lastly, I made these posters a while back, but never had the chance to print them out. Last year, I found that my kids gave up too easily when working on an assignment or a task. I would literally just finish giving directions and not even a minute later, I had kids raising their hand to ask for assistance. I want my students to be able to think critically. I want them to become independent and I want for them to be able to work through a problem by trying every single strategy before needing my assistance. My kids hate when I answer their questions with questions, but I always remind them that I do this for them. They won't have my assistance on the test.

That being said, I created these posters to help my kids become more independent. About 98% of the time, questions some of my kids had would have been answered if they would have looked in their interactive notebooks. So when I teach these procedures at the beginning of the school year, I will make sure to emphasize that they need to have their interactive notebooks out to the correct lesson by the time they need to ask for my assistance. Same goes for the problem solving template that I will give them. I want to visually see that they have tried everything they could to complete their assignment.

Until next time! :-)