Five for...Saturday?

I've decided I love these blogger link-ups. You all are so creative and inspiring and funny and I love reading about your lives/teaching endeavors/pinning sprees/new products. But here I am, dropping the ball on Doodle Bugs's Five for Friday. Because if you haven't noticed, it's Saturday.

I got home from work yesterday and fell onto the couch with no intentions of ever getting up. Apparently I had forgotten how exhausting this first week of teaching is! I think I was ready to go to bed by 5:30 - no joke. I did end up leaving my apartment to have game night with a few of my friends from work around 7:00. Needless to say, a blog post was not in the cards yesterday.

So, here's my Five for Friday. On a Saturday. Enjoy!

I love First Day Jitters. We all love First Day Jitters. In addition to sharing this story on the first day of school, I decided to have us make our very first class book, too! If you are interested, here is the template I made. Enjoy!

By Friday, we definitely needed a break from the routines and rules and readiness assessments and routines and did I mention the routines? I decided to share one of my favorite books, David McKee's Elmer, with my firsties and had them complete an adorable craft and writing activity. For the elephants, I found a template online and copied it onto cardstock. The kids used cut up sponges to create Elmer's patchwork look and attached a googly eye. Click here for the writing paper I used.

I am attempting to remediate the constant "Where do I put this?" issue. Last year, students were constantly confused on whether or not something was ready to be turned in, if it needed to go in a folder, or if it was supposed to go in the basket. And on the occasional moment I had them put one single assignment in their mailboxes, they began putting everything in their mailboxes. It was a disaster. This year, I'm trying these little signs at the front of the room, which I attached with velcro. Let's see how it goes!

I thought this was too cute not to share. It is so, so nice to feel this appreciated at the beginning of the year :)

Lastly, I finally committed to some light-blocking curtains for my bedroom. I thought making a decision on which to get was the hard part - boy, was I in for a rude awakening when I attempted to install them. But ten gazillion mistakes and bad words later, here we are! Thankfully the tops of the curtains hide my awful handiwork with the power drill.