Finally Getting Around to a Monday Made It

This summer has been jam packed with so many different things and this week is no different! Today starts my first day of our districts Teacher College Reading and Writing Project Homegrown Writing Institute (Whew!What a mouthful!). I'm so excited to hopefully get to put everything that I have learned into practice this year. Even though things have been really busy, I finally got around to a Monday Made It! 

I'm so excited that I FINALLY got around to this one. Especially seeing as I intended to do this TWO years ago. 

I made a teacher organizer!

Okay fine, as you can see it's not completely done and I need to print out a few more labels... but it's cute so far right? :)

Aren't the labels so cute? I actually used two different pack from Teachers Pay Teachers to do this. You can tell that they are a bit different, but when they are all mixed together I don't think that it is too noticeable.
The first one that I used is by Ladybug Teacher Files and it is the Student Toolbox Labels (Consistent Colors) . I ABSOLUTELY LOVE  her consistent colors collection and am planning to buy a few other items from her store before the start of the year. The other pack that I used are these Teacher Toolbox Labels. I believe that they are both able to be edited.

So it may not be a completely finished project, but better than nothing right? Fortunately for me I still have three more weeks until I'm back at school!

Tech Tuesday on a Monday: Using Gmail for Student Email Accounts

I didn't intend for this to be it's own post, but as I was writing my post about using a program called Piazza in the classroom, I realized how important this was on it's own if you didn't already know how to use it. Using technology in the classroom is awesome, but many times we come to the realization that for every single student account we need to have an email for them. In high school and maybe even middle school for some of you out there, this isn't a problem; but many of my elementary kids don't have email. Even if they do have email, maybe you don't want them to be using it in school. Who knows what is on there!

An easy way to have different email accounts for each student is to use your ONE gmail account. 

For instance, my gmail is misshayden26@gmail.com. When I wanted to get all ten of my students Haiku Deck accounts, I used my gmail to set it up. 

By giving each student the email of misshayden26+InsertIdentifier@gmail.com, they all have their "own" email address, but all correspondence goes to my one account. You don't have to do anything online for this to work, simply tell your students their assigned email address.  Gmail does not recognize anything after the "+". For my students this summer, I simply used "Student1" and changed the number for each student. For the students I work with all year, I will use their names as identifiers. 

When the email comes to your inbox, you can see who it is for:

You can see that the email is to "misshayden26+David@gmail.com", but it and all of the other emails are still sent to the single email account. 

This is just a very simple tip that can help a lot in your classroom. When I found out about it a few years ago, my mind was blown! 

Is there a simple tip that made a big difference in your classroom?

Hope everyone is have a good end to their summer! I  know that Chloe and I are so excited to finally get to sleep in this weekend. She is doing a bit of napping to make up for her early morning as we speak. 

Happy teaching!

Success in Secondary Linky Party!

I'm feeling quite ambitious today and am spending a relaxing evening at home after going to opening night of my school's musical (and it was amazing! More to come about this later this weekend).  Found 4mula Fun today and am already obsessed! So many great ideas that I need to borrow!  While there I read about their Success in Secondary Linky and couldn't resist. :)

It's nice to find some cute stuff for the older grades. I teach elementary talented and gifted so I teach higher material but with younger kids. Obsessed with her products... my TPT "to buy" list is getting way to long now!   

If you are a Virginia teacher you may find my SOL checklists helpful. Currently I have them made for second through sixth grade standards in math. My goal this summer is to get them for the other subjects as well. I am obsessed with mine and have shared it with other teachers at my school and they love it too! I must admit that I created it to be used from the beginning of the school year, but I restarted mine at the end of the year. I like it to do quick checks with  my class and see what skills we still need to work on. In honor of this being a secondary linky party, feel free to grab my sixth grade checklist below(Click the picture)!

Also, if you are looking for some practical uses for dividing with decimals, check out my Great Toilet Paper Debate activity. We all know that the big word floating around the teaching world is rigor. That being said, we need to find real world applications for math. Honestly, I just wanted to know what brand of toilet paper to buy. But somehow my question turned into an activity that allows students to do internet research, lots of computation, and finally some problem solving and critical thinking to make a real world decision about what brand of toilet paper they should buy. Check it out below!

Time to get some shut eye for this girl. My big is graduating with her Masters in Special Education tomorrow! It's going to be a busy day celebrating her accomplishments!

Happy Teaching!