BLOG LOVIN Fever and Calendar Linky!

<a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/6595733/?claim=5w8m3gk7x62">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

First of all, have you all caught that BLOGLOVIN Fever yet?! 

I signed up last week, and I'm SO glad I did. I'm now more addicted than ever, and I thought I would link up to get more followers. In the next couple of weeks, I definitely plan to finally edit and post some freebies. I made TONS of stuff throughout the year last school year and never found the time to post! However, that should change next year! So go ahead and follow me on Bloglovin (click the blue button over in the right corner), and leave me a comment so I can make sure I follow you too! ;) And I will TRY my best to be a better blogger.... well, after the big day that is. (We get MARRIED in 25 days!!!!! EEEE!) If you're not on bloglovin' yet, click the picture blow to see Tori's post about how to sign up. She makes it SUPER simple, and trust me, it's worth your 5 minutes!


And after you follow me, if you haven't already, you should HOP on over to Tori over at Tori's Teacher Tips. Now this is important, so LISTEN UP! When you get there, follow these instructions for a possible CHANCE of her Back to School FREEBIE packet, AND $10 to spend in her store! Isn't she amazing? I love her already! So first:
1. Click on the picture below to go to her blog
2. Click on her button on the top right to Follow her on bloglovin'
3. Leave her a comment with your name and email address, notifying her that you are a follower.
4. Cross your fingers and wait to be contacted. She will choose *ONE LUCKY WINNER* per day. I hope I win! I just want the back to school activity packet!
5. She also gave strict instructions to browse around the other bloggers that have linked up. It's good to make new friends and meet new bloggers!

Secondly, I'm linking up with Sharing Kindergarten for the Calendar Time Linky Party!

I did a post at the beginning of last year about my calendar routine. I really enjoyed my calendar time, and I changed it up a few times throughout the year, but it was pretty basic. I kept it straight and simple to help the kids learn the routine. I SWEAR (no joke) by the end of the year, the kids were leading the entire routine by themselves while I snuck over to my desk for a bite of granola bar, or to eat my banana, or check emails, etc. (hehe) I'm bad, I know, but I was building independence, OKAY?! So here's the link for that post: Click Here! When you get there, you will need to scroll about half-way down to get to the calendar part, because I did a dual-post that day with some of my behavior management freebies. But please go check it out and give me feedback!

Thanks for stopping by!
~Sarah

My first FIVE FOR FRIDAY!

So today, I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to tell you about my random week! And although I've received a job offer, but still don't know what position it's for yet, this is a 100% non-educational post. Oh well... It's been busy and hard to only choose 5, so here we go! 

 1. My 25th birthday!

So, actually my birthday was LAST Friday, but who cares? I did little to celebrate (I actually had a pretty normal day... run, walk dogs, lunch with Dad, brother, and Aunt, and a friend that they work with) but we did go to Seasons 52 for dinner with the family! It was so sweet that they gave me a card!! (I guess they do it for everyone who goes their for their birthday, but I felt so special) I resisted the tower of desserts in the bottom right hand corner, but I blew out my candle (top right) and went for the layers of fruit instead! Call me crazy, but this one has been dessert free since January, and ONLY CHEATED ONCE! (For a good reason... HA!)

2. Bachelorette Weekend!

So here's the scoop... With having a wedding in late July, many people are out of town throughout the summer and it made it difficult to choose a weekend for the bachelorette party. But honestly the best weekend for our girls night out was also my bday weekend (which is a month before the wedding). So it was a 2 in 1 and I couldn't have asked for a better celebration! I made cups for everyone during our painting class. It's called Sips-N-Strokes (SO MUCH FUN!!). We had done this for another girl's party, and I thought it was genius. The painting of the night just happened to be "Dancing martini's" which was a total coincidence, but SO appropriate for the occasion! One of my artistic friends added a diamond ring to the bottom left hand corner, and I hand-wrote our wedding date in it! :D It's PERFECT!

3. Mother Nature Strikes again:

Basically, it's been raining ALOT this year. Anyone notice? Well, it was so bad this week, that the creek in our backyard has risen about a million feet higher than normal. I took a picture only because that log is usually at least 3 feet off the ground. The picture of the house was actually taken from our storm that we had LAST Thursday, but it shows how bad the storm hit our area. The power went out for days around this area (luckily our power was only out for 5 hours, but our friends 4 miles away were out for 3 days) and trees were fallen everywhere. I could have posted many more pics, but I decided not to.

4. Just when life seems too good to be true....

(The lighting makes it look like it's two different colors, but it's just an illusion!) 

So in the week that I had gotten a call for an interview and received the job the next day (10 minutes after the interview, to be exact), I thought that I was dreaming. Then, we went to our old house for the weekend. On the way there, we had to rush our dog to the emergency room because of an allergic reaction (long story short she was okay) after sitting in the worst Atlanta traffic for an hour. (I wish I had pics, but I didn't have any of the good ones)... Then to make matters worse, my wonderful fiance hit a deer on the way home later that weekend. In MY BRAND NEW CAR! (Just got it in March) Even longer story short: I had a small week-long vacation from my new car, but the GOOD NEWS is that I got it back on Monday! Yay!! Just as good as new!

5. Wedding Fever! Big date=1 month away!!!!!! :D

So we are officially one month from saying "I do" and I'm SO EXCITED! I cannot wait to post all about the plans! However, what I will tell is that I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep because of all the ideas running through  my head! I have been clueless what to do for centerpieces on such a tight budget but I think I have an idea that I might try. I'm hoping to give it a shot this weekend, so I can post it for MADE IT MONDAY! Anyways, the tricky part is that with a destination wedding, everything needs to go on a plane. So I thought about taking some plastic water bottles and spray painting them silver, like this one on the left or middle.

 
Then, I want to go to Hobby Lobby and get some yellow artificial flowers, even as simple as the one above, and voila! Cheap, easy, simple centerpieces that match my grey and canary yellow color scheme! I cannot wait! I just hope I can find the perfect flowers! Any suggestions?! Please let me know what you think!

Happy Friday, and have a wonderful weekend! :)
~Sarah

PS: Backround frames came from Emily Wean. Find them at her store by clicking here

Updates and Portfolio preparation

Well, so.... I'm a slacker. 

I know it. As much as I wanted to keep up with my blog all year, it didn't happen. But I hope to be much better at it next year! I just got busy! What can I say! I also think that it doesn't help that sometime shortly after I finished my master's degree in December, my laptop gave out on me. The computer itself was fine, but the screen didn't work, and it was too much of a pain to hook it up to the TV with the HDMI cable. A new computer was not in the budget and any minimal computing that I did need to do could be done on Dan's computer. So I never got the flexibility to sit around and blog much. However, I got a new laptop for my birthday on Friday, so I hope to be much better this summer!

SO today marks my 3rd Monday since the move, so I consider it to be my 3rd Monday of summer vacation. Where has time gone? So quick recap: After Dan got a job transfer to the Atlanta corporate office within his company, we decided this would be the perfect time to make our transition back home. After all, I grew up in Alpharetta, spent 5 years in Statesboro, and 2 in Augusta. It was about time we headed home to be closer to family. It was a HUGE decision because of the wedding coming up in July, so we knew it was going to be a crazy summer. But we also knew that everything would eventually work out, and so far it has!

On Monday #1, I found an email from a principal in an amazing elementary school at a top-notch school system in the metro-Atlanta area, wanting to interview! Luckily, I was able to set up an interview for the next day, so I hustled to get my portfolio updated. I will say that I'm very proud of the final product and hope to post pictures later. I probably spent too much time on it, but I had a goal in mind, and that goal was to make my first interview of the summer also my last (I was just really dreading having to interview all summer and not know what I would be teaching in the fall).

Well, all the hardwork on my portfolio definitely paid off. I had the best interview of my life, probably due to the principal's awesome personality. After she called my first reference (the principal at my school from this previous year), she called me (probably 10 minutes after I left) to OFFER ME A JOB!! I was so so so excited. I thought I was dreaming. It was absolutely definitely positively 100% HANDS DOWN the most excited I had been in a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng time. The thrill of knowing that I got a job on the 2nd day of my summer vacation, and knowing that the search was over was just HUGE! So from there, I decided to relax.

It took an entire week to get my new routine figured out. Walking the dogs 10 billion times a day has been a huge adjustment for me, considering we had the luxury of a fenced in back yard at our Augusta house. I never walked them, because I could just let them out before and after meals, and whenever in between. It was great because they could stay outside and lounge in the sun ALL DAY on the weekends, and they just LOVED it. Now that we're temporarily staying with my mom, and due to the fact that she has no fenced-in backyard, we have no choice but to leash them. This is super annoying, because my dogs STRONGLY DISLIKE leashes, but if we take them off, they like to run away :( . So as I have been settling into my new routine, I've also been doing a lot of lounging and relaxing. Who wouldn't?! I worked hard for the past few years, and this is my first summer of not working (purposely so that I could find a job-which I already did- and find a new house and focus on the last of the wedding preparations). So that brings us up-to-date. :)

Okay, so after I did all this preparation for my interview, I realized that it might be helpful to share it with some of my new teacher friends who just graduated this past year. So, my treat to you is a template for what I used. It is in a word document, complete with comments to help you make it your own. You need to delete the comments as you go, so that it will not print funny. If your school system uses the TKES evaluation system, this would be a perfect portfolio template for you! Each section addresses each of the 10 standards. As an added bonus, I included a self-assessment at the bottom for you to complete to help yourself identify your strengths and weaknesses to create professional goals from. As a trial school, we were required to do this self-assessment at the beginning of last year, and I printed out all of my evaluation results from throughout the year to add to my portfolio. It was never looked at it, but as a new teacher, you can never be TOO prepared, and it may help you get your thoughts together for your big day. I hope it helps!

Click here to get the portfolio template!

When you click on the link, it will bring you to the Google Drive document. You need to DOWNLOAD it and save it to your computer so you can edit it and make the changes yourself. Please email me if you have any questions!

Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Donor's Choose

We have had lot's of exciting things happening in and out of the classroom! My fiance and I have been trying to narrow down our wedding date and venue. So in the past few weekends, we've managed to get our engagement pictures taken, visit an amazing venue, visit our old college town friends, visit the UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA for a football game, and welcome the mother-in-law for the first time! And to top it all off, I've finally got my wedding dress!!!! YAYY! So I have been staying busy and trying to forget about all the stress that comes with obtaining a master's degree! I am now three weeks away from the last class I will EVER attend for this degree! YAYYYY!

So in the classroom, I'm finally beginning to see the MILES of progress that we've made. This is the MOST remarkable thing about working with high-functioning autism. I mean check out this FACE! Have you ever seen such a better smile of pride?! It was the first time he had ever completed an ENTIRE worksheet INDEPENDENTLY!!

I was SO excited, that I jumped up and down, screamed, squealed, and obviously scared the entire class, but I could have cried because I was so happy! And then, I had barely even put my camera away, and IN walked our DONOR'S CHOOSE DELIVERY!!! How do you spell: "B-E-S-T-D-A-Y-E-V-E-R"?!?! Here's a little teeny-tiny peek:

 One little man in particular was excited to see all that we received... 

... There will be more pictures to come later!!! ...

So, back on track... for Halloween, we made these awesome little pumpkin ornaments from Oriental Trading! Another teacher was SO sweet, and gave me her extra's when I complimented the work of her students. Ahh the benefits of having 5 students :D So we had them draw and decorate, and then we wrote about them. Here's just a few....

We practice writing and tracing everyday, but this student has NEVER traced this much writing before - EVER! I guess it goes to show that students can make so much progress when you add new activities.

 

 Our Kindergartner Little Man here, just began copying words and sentences independently. Before, we had been writing everything in highlighter, and allowing him to trace. He wrote 3 sentences: "My pumpkin has teeth. My pumpkin has eyes. My pumpkin has a nose."  ISN'T THAT AMAZING?!

I love holidays!! For Thanksgiving, I had the fiance and future step-mother to come and visit our classroom!! So I arranged to make turkey oreo cookies that day! It was so much fun!!! 

 Upside down feathers!! Ah hahaha so cute though!

 

Last but not least... we've got to add some turkey legs!!!

 Finished products!!

 

And then as we ate our treats, we enjoyed our FAVORITE song on the ACTIV BOARD... Don't you just LOVE Chicka Chicka Boom Boom? We got to show our special visitors, and they all loved it! We had so much fun!

And then we all went home after that! It was the best day ever. Here are some other things that we did for Thanksgiving....

 I thought I had a more recent picture, but I guess I will have to add it later! So this is my outdoor display of our TOM TURKEYS!! I had sent home Turkeys to be decorated and disguised so that they will not be hunted by the farmer and eaten for Thanksgiving dinner...

   

Do you believe one student thought of the TURKEY BIEBER all by herself?! LOL I allowed for the families to help out with decorating and gathering materials, but this one thought of the idea all by herself, and her family helped to cut everything out! It was so amazing! There were a couple of turkeys who didn't follow directions, but they sent Tom back with color, so that was great! The one on the right is the GHOSTBUSTER turkey... hahaha so cute!

 We made turkey hand prints to go along with our poems. ^^ And then we made Indian Headdresses with patterns. I allowed them to choose the shapes they wanted, and what type of pattern. Only one student made an ABC pattern, but the rest did AB patterns, and that was great!! We normally practice extending patterns, but now that I know they can create patterns independently, we're gonna have even more to practice! :D

 That's all for now! Please share your Thanksgiving festivities! Leave a comment with a link to your blog!
~Sarah

Best Field Trip EVER!!!

I HAVE to share some of the awesomely ADORABLE pictures that we got from today's exciting day! We were invited to go trick-or-treating which was organized by our local news station and sponsored by local businesses around the area, and I had NEVER seen some of the smiles that we saw today. This trip was so well worth every bit of hard work we have put in during the school year...

^^ First, a picture of the awesome bulletin board my para made us last week during our half day :). She was able to pull them individually to decorate a fall shape of their choice, and she put names on the other shapes. She is SO awesome. I wouldn't trade her for ANYTHING. :D

^^ After face painting, I tried to get all their pictures outside... next to the door... I forgot one. But we were going to be late, so OH WELL.

 

^^The AMAZING Ms. K doing some face painting, next to the MOST HANDSOME-looking were wolf EVER!!! 

^^ Here we have two triceratops dinosaurs. Poor boy on the left REALLY wanted to be the INCREDIBLE Hulk, but poor Ms. K couldn't figure out how to make a Hulk hat! :/ Lucky for him, we ran into (whaddya know?) Mr. Hulk himself at the event.

 ^Soooo tickled by his favorite hero! :)

 ^^Our boys love any kind of reptile. Dinosaurs, lizards, alligators, you name it... So OF COURSE we had to get a picture with the crocodile. Nobody really cared for Cap'n Hook, but he never left Mr. Alligator's side.. so we took a picture with both! LOL

 ^^Most amazing part EVER!! They had STUDENTS setting up round tables with cake, rice krispies, and juice!! Our class LOVES snack! Better yet, you would not BELIEVE the service! They had young kids, (I mean 11 years old) coming around with trays, asking politely if they could "...take any trash out of your way for you ma'am?" Like WHAT!? I don't know who trained them, but they were TOTALLY amazing. They even came around offering teachers cans of Sprite and bottles of water. I loved them. I wish I could take them home! :D

^Not sure I've ever seen them so happy in my LIFE!

 

^We even went to the playground afterwards! The weather was perfect, and it was super fun to play on a different playground. 

So that's it... My chicken soup for the day. I love fun days. Funny how polar opposite some of our days can go. Sometimes they are too good to be true, and other days, well, we just have to keep on ...keepin' on, as I like to say :) Either way, I LOVE my class, and I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world! Days like this remind me that this is definitely the best year of my life!