Gift tag and poster freebie and an enchanted forest in the works!

Have you seen these two Blogs?

                                    

They are AWESOME!  Nancy from First Grade Wow is ultra-generous! And Jeannie from Kindergarten Lifestyle has great ideas. I used two of theirs from this week. 

Nancy has made a unit of morning work freebies (some of which I used last year) and Jeannie has blogged about her little parent gift for the first day of school. So I took these ideas and tweaked them to fit my enchanted classroom theme. You can see their ideas here and here.  And here is my enchanted forest version of them.





Here is my enchanted forest so far:
My girls helped me bling up some of the plastic bugs. My husband, the principal is going to take bets with the staff on how long before the sword is pulled out and fought with. It may not stay there, but it's so enchanted looking! I have to do something with it!

The tree is brown paper from school. The kind on the big roll. My kids helped me cut it down the middle and just twist it to make it look gnarly. There's a lot of paper in that bad boy. I plan to fill it up with paper leaves that either have vocab words on them, or Spalding rules, or spelling words, or something, I'm not sure yet. I would like to get the room pretty well finished by Wednesday. We'll see. On the first day of school I plan to do an explore time, where the kids can just look around and feel everything. Try to get it out of their system at least a LITTLE bit. Thanks for looking!

Now go get your freebie and check out those two blogs!
 
[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]

Free poetry activities

Have you seen these anywhere online? They're poetry cubes. I just inherited some from a retiring teacher. I love 'em! They're super fun, just to roll around and read. Each cube is wrapped in themed paper that correlates with the poetry on it. So I've been thinking about how to use them, and I think I'm going to try using them as morning work, like once a week.

I put my kids' desks in groups, so each group will get a die. They'll decide who gets to roll it, and the poem on the top is the one they will use for that day. I made some free poetry activities to use with it. You can get those freebies here.

I didn't include the poetry used on the cubes. I tried to keep the activities basic enough that you could use them with any poetry. If you have any other ideas for the poetry cubes, I'd love to hear 'em! And they seem pretty simple to make. Just wrap a box, print some small poems and tape 'em on! Simple, just time consuming. But worth the effort. So get your freebie here!

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[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]

Art curriculum freebie

Do you have an art curriculum? Me, either. Do you throw it together last minute because you are NOT an art teacher, and have very little artistic ability? Me, too! So this year I PLANNED!!!!!!! Here's what I came up with:  (It's FREE, by the way!!!)

 You don't need to have the book on that last page, but it does have a lot of great information. Some of it is worksheets, but I like the simplification of the worksheets as an introduction to the elements. I only use a few of the worksheet parts. And I use a lot of websites with great projects from qualified art teachers whose projects are SO COOL!!! Check it out HERE.

I hope this works for you! And for me, frankly!!!! Now, I HAVE to finish my reading curriculum maps!! I've put it off long enough!
 
[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]