Five for Friday, on Saturday (again) and a Safety Tip

I'm linking up late for Five for Friday!

I found a new absolute favorite app I want to share with you.  Pics Art is available for either Android or i phones, and it is Awe-Some!  You can turn your photos into the cutest things ever before uploading them to Instagram, or wherever you want to share them.  It's free and super easy to use, from adding clip art, frames, doodles, text, and more, to saving and uploading, it's the best app I've seen, and I've checked out literally 20 or more!

My sweet class finished Hollie Griffith's Kevin Henkes author study this week, and made Chrysanthemum craft-ivities with speech bubbles of what she might way, like, "I whisper my name in the mirror" or "I love my name". Before this unit, my students had never heard of text connections, but they can now easily identify all three types, all three authors' purposes, character traits, story elements, and have fallen in love with an author and several books, which is the first step in falling in love with reading!  I'm so thankful to Hollie to have done such a great job with her unit.  We're off to a great start, and everything has transferred so easily into my LLI lessons!

It's possible that this is the absolute most boring and plainest anchor chart I've ever made, but my little class needs kind of a no-frills approach this year. We'll probably keep it simple until they are more fluent readers, so that they're not distracted by fancy handwriting, cutesy borders, or too many words. Sometimes, simple is best (and I'm a glitter-lovin', curly-cue-drawin', Fancy Nancy kinda girl).

I am SUPER EXCITED to be participating in
from Lessons With Coffee!  I have "met" two bloggers already, and just received my matches yesterday. Jameson could not have had a cuter, better idea!  If you haven't participated yet, it's too late this month, but be sure to check it out next month.  You get to know two bloggers, receive and give a gift box, and support teachers nation- and world-wide!

The Desk Fairy may never have to visit my room again.  I am amazed at how wonderfully the plastic trays I found this summer are working to keep my second graders organized and neat!  I've never even seen desks that look like these before!

Oh. My. Word!!!  I dropped in at Hobby Lobby this week, looking for some shimmery embroidery floss for friendship bracelets (which they do have, by the way, and I did buy), but what I found was nothing short of a miracle!
I know you can't see the clearance price, but it was $41.99, and came with 50 sheets, in assorted sizes, of lamination film too!  It's a hot or cold personal laminator, that takes paper up to 13 inches wide (amazing in and of itself), is self-adjusting for the thickness of the lamination sheets, and is lightweight, wonderful, and my new BFF!  I haven't laminated one single thing this year at school.  We have three laminators, but as soon as film is installed, it's gone within 2-3 hours on all three machines!  NO LIE!  I don't even know how people know it's there by the time it's gone again!  My "lamination" usually consists of a huge fight with clear contact paper, whatever I'm trying to make, and a pair of gooey scissors!  But no more, thanks to this baby!

So, that safety tip I promised?  It's about hot glue guns.  Instead of ending up with a band-aid, begin with one!  Put it on your thumb, and you'll never get burned again.  You know you're going to follow your line of glue, pressing down whatever you're working on as you go, and you know that it's going to burn the crud-o-la out of your finger or thumb, so cover that finger or thumb with a band-aid before you begin, them smooth away, and you're protected from the heat of the hot glue!  It's like a little miracle I discovered while happening to have a band-aid on my thumb and using a hot-as-fire glue gun.

Hugs,