More and More Banners

Last week I had the opportunity to help give the school board a tour of my school. They meandered around, making comments and asking questions. A photographer snapped pictures occasionally of the rooms that have slowly become classrooms.

My classroom looks almost ready to go! I have a ceiling, electricity, and running water. All I need is carpet, whiteboards, and bulletin boards.

I am excited to visit again soon. The building inspector's visit is scheduled for a week from today. We are all crossing our fingers that he (or she) will find nothing wrong and will give us the green light to move in a week from Monday.

Even my skylights open and close now. I am a pretty lucky girl.

One thing that I made the last couple of weeks is pizza. Lots and lots of pizza. I have perfected the easy dough recipe I found and have been harvesting our basil like crazy. I could eat this every day. (For a while, I was eating it every day.)

Another creation I made are these awesome gold magnet letters. My only complaint with the generic magnet letters is that they only give you one letter per pack. Why do I need three q's but only have three e's? My awesome landlord's kids enjoyed spelling out their names the last time they visited.

Finally, I have been making more and more banners. I love this one because it is a specific font. I can string my twine through the stars for this easy one.

I ran out of ideas for shapes for my banners. Because I have been creating these banners like crazy, I wanted each one to be a bit different. This one is very different. They look like ghosts to me.

I adore this one. Each letter sits on a tag shape.

My spelling banner consists of scalloped rectangles.

And...guess what this one is supposed to spell? It doesn't help that you can't read the letters very well or that I am missing a letter.

Last, but not least is my outside welcome banner. Gold glitter doilies with two sets of circles (one scalloped, one regular) and green striped letters on top. It's simple and classy.

Linking up

Birthday Banner

I think birthdays (or half birthdays) in the classroom are a wonderful thing. I don't go over the top to celebrate or take up more than five minutes for the birthday kid, but I like to do small things to make them feel special. I try to remember a few days in advance how excited they are for their birthday. On the big day, I try to call them "birthday boy/girl" at least a few times. A few months ago, I thought of another thing I could do to make it just a little more special.
Last year, I was cleaning out my drawer that holds all my (dozens of) banners during recess. Some of my adorable girls were helping out and they saw a store bought birthday banner that some of my students bought me my first year of teaching. They got really excited because it just so happened to be someone's birthday on that very day! The girls grabbed it and hung it up on the back whiteboard. That got me thinking...
What if I made a cuter banner to hang up on a kid's birthday (or the school day in which the child was being celebrated)? Any teacher could do that and hang it up in the classroom, but what if I hung it up outside of the classroom so that any passer by would see that someone was having a birthday in my classroom, just to casually announce it to the world? And so my birthday banner was born. It took a while to make the gold dangly pieces because I didn't have the exact type of material that I would have liked, but in the end, it may just be my favorite banner I have ever made. (And that's saying something.)
I love the glitter lettering. I love the shape of the letters. I love the gold tassels. I love the paper that looks just a bit like it has birthday confetti on it. (I was even going to add pompoms to the point of each banner piece, but I thought that might be going a bit overboard...)
I love it.
On either side of my doorway at school, I will permanently put up a couple of clothespins (with gold stars on them) so that assembly and removal of the banner will be a piece of cake. In fact, I'll probably give the job of hanging the banner to my students. Because students like to be helpful and stand on chairs and hang things up. (Also, if I forget...someone else can take the blame.)

p.s. Do you love the wall? That has been the great project this summer for my husband and me. We have painted everything except for the tall wall towering over the stairs.
Also, yesterday I talked about what I do with all of those paper scraps I get while making these projects.

Linking up

Bad Pictures of Cute Banners

In the past, I have labeled my bulletin boards, but only with flimsy paper letters that I threw away when I changed up the boards and the later regretted throwing away the letters because I needed to cut out a new label.
Earlier this week, I cut out lots of banner shapes out of double-sided cardstock and then cut out letters for my bulletin boards. I laminated them separately so that if I want to change what one says, I can easily take off the laminated letters and file them away.
Taking pictures of lamination is tricky. I'll get better images once they are hung up in my classroom.

One for Class Dojo. I switched my rewards system last year from punch cards to Class Dojo. It is much simpler and super easy to pull out my phone to give points. There are magnet boards that the kids move up every day.
The front side has green dots on it and the back is covered with blue and green leaves.

I want my math groups to be better organized this year. There will be a spot in the classroom that holds all the materials. The front side is green dots on white and the back has straight green vines over green.

I have social studies on bulletin boards a few times each year. I did the letters over a map of the world paper and the back is a pink lattice paper.

My school is piloting genius hour in my district. We won't even have the technology for a month or two to fully implement it, but I already have an awesome bulletin board designed in my mind. This paper was single sided.

This one is probably my favorite. I might have to make two smaller banners to outline matter and heredity. The frond is black arrows and the back is gray triangles.

I also spray painted some of my own school supplies gold. My students last year were really into making things and I often found them leaning over my stuff to grab my stapler (even though there was one for them to use with much easier access.) My rule this year? If it's gold, it's mine. Don't touch.
(Side note: You can see my name smudging off the stapler. The only reason I put my name on it is because my student stapler disappeared last year. I still don't know what happened to it, but in all innocence, I imagine someone accidentally took it and because there was no name, they did not know who to give it to.)

Linking up:

My Favorite Thing

On this lovely Mother's Day, I have been thinking about the things I regret not doing while my mother was alive. I have decided that the biggest regret I have is that I never dragged her (or pushed her) to see my classroom. She passed away the second week into my first year of teaching and the entire summer I set up my room, I continually had the thought that I needed her to see my creation of a classroom. I wanted her to see it...I just never got around to arranging to have her come in.
She taught for several years in school and she was my biggest (albeit quietest) supporter. On one occasion when I received a highly praising email from one of my favorite mentors from BYU, I immediately forwarded it to my parents and they replied with their own lovely email.
It's too late now to see her reaction to my classroom and teaching, but I know she has been with me while I have taught.
If you were to take a moment to step into my classroom, you would find an overabundance of bunting. Banners. Pennants. Garlands. Whatever you want to call them, I have more than a slight obsession with them.
Let's take a look, shall we?

Upon first arriving to my classroom, you run into this little beauty. She took the longest out of any banner I have made. Each circle has 6 layers involved. I am pleasantly surprised to see how well it has held up throughout a year of being displayed in the hallway after so many indoor recesses of hundreds of kids tromping by.

Once you come into the class, there are many cloud garlands that adorn my ceiling to go along with my awesome hot air balloon table numbers.

I love welcome signs. What's not to love about a welcome sign with typewriter font and pinwheels?

There are many little pennants that are hard to find in my classroom. I made this washi tape banner while proctoring the DWA. (Let me say how happy I am that my grade is lucky enough to have Chrome books which allows us to do our SAGE testing in the classroom.)

I don't mind if kids spell my name incorrectly (most of them do), but I do get a little irritated at them asking me...all the time. It's something I really should not get irritated at because they just want to make me a card or draw a picture with me labeled in it. Now I can just point if they ask me.

 Adorning the back whiteboard is the easiest one I have made yet. Glitter clothespins I made last year with cute ribbon the PTA donated and circle punches out of one of my favorite paper packs took no time at all to hang up.

Okay. This one should have come down after March left. I just love it too much. This little guy took my a while to put together. I should have been lazy and just bought green glitter paper, but I am a penny pincher. Thanks to Martha Stewart glitter and a nice layer of Mod Podge, the letters and shamrocks and sparkly without having glitter fall off causing rage to fill my custodian's heart. (You can't have the custodian mad at you. You just can't. That's rule #2 in my book.)

 Sometimes I am lazy and find a great deal at a scrapbook supply sale. A tiny, adorable strand of banners for one dollar? Yes please.
Also, I wish I was not so OCD. I love my map of the US that I made this summer...but Georgia and Delaware do not match with the rest of the colors. I forget what happened this summer, but I had to cut them out of different paper that did not match the other colors. I will sadly be taking down the map, state by state, and replacing it with a new map where all the colors match perfectly. Plus, did you know that you can make any map of anything with just four colors? Yeah. I'll be doing that next time.

My birthday chart even has darling shapes strung out on a picture frame.

 And...my latest creation. I need to get the circles to be more 3D. I ended up hanging this one on my projector screen. I think I may have ran out of room for any more banners.

Even my signs have little banners on them. My Chrome book signs have this cute decoration on them.

As does my correct punctuation sign.

Are you surprised at the lack of bunting in my classroom? Don't worry; there's more. I keep all my seasonal banners in a drawer. I have pennants for Halloween, Thanksgiving, fall, Christmas, winter, 100th day of school, and Valentine's Day.

Welcome {sign}

I rather enjoy pennants/bunting. I had pennants at my wedding reception two years ago, I have pennants in my apartment, and I have pennants in my classroom.
I have been making pennants now for several years. Almost all of them have been the standard triangle (or square or circle) attached to string somehow. Last year I made an awesome one for the 100th day of school which I of course did not take a picture of and the fancy guy now sits in my classroom many miles away.
I decided to go a little crazy on a pennant and see how it turned out. I love it.
Here is what you need for a multi-layered pennant.

5 types of paper (One cut into 6" circles, I folded into an accordion folded rosette with a diameter of 5",  one cut into a scalloped circle of just over 3", one cut into a circle with a diameter of 3", and the last type of paper cut into letters that will fit in the smallest circle.)
Streamer paper
Stick-on pearl beads

Assembly is pretty logical. You want the biggest circle at the back and the smallest at the front. The only problem was that I had a large gap between the rosette and the scalloped circle. That is where the streamers come into play.
I taped one end of the streamer to the other end so it formed a loop. Then I started to scrunch together one edge of my loop.

Eventually I was able to flatten the loop completely. After taping it down, it fit perfectly in the gap.

I assembled it with hot glue and put three beads somewhere on each letter.

There you have it. A slightly more complex pennant. When it is completely finished (it will eventually say "Welcome to Mrs. Jaeger's class") I will hang it up with clothes pins onto some butcher's twine.