Super Sunday Sale

Are you ready for some football---sales? Teachers Pay Teachers loves to throw sales. To celebrate the upcoming Super Bowl game, TPT is throwing a Super Sunday Sale on February 3rd. You can get your favorite things from my store for 28% off on that day. Yay for a sale, right?

Make sure you visit my store on that day because every item in my store will be on sale, like my newest product Valentine’s Day Frenzy. And speaking of my store and more recently milestones, I finally reached 100 items in my store. I’ve been trying to reach this number for quite some time. Slow and steady wins the race.

One more thing! I invite you to visit my blogging friend Dinah at the Traveling Classroom here to enter her 50 followers giveaway. I’m giving away Money Bingo in Set 2.

Have a blessed Thursday evening!

Giveaway Announcement + Tech Tip + New Product + Super Sunday Sale

Howdy all! Thanks to EVERYONE who enter my mega Milestone Giveaway. I am happy to announce the awesome four winners. Here they are:

Congrats ladies and thanks for entering. Also, I’d like to thank all of those who donated their lovely products. This giveaway took a lot of work, but I was able to “meet” several great bloggers and other teacher authors. I also gained new followers which is always great.

Moving right along…I have a quick Tech Tip for you. While conducting my giveaway, someone commented and asked if I could be followed by email. I saw other blogs offering this feature, but I was baffled as to how to do it. So I “googled” how to do this and I’d like to share this information with you.

First log into your Blogger account. Next to your blog’s name, click the drop down menu and choose “Layout”

You should see your blog layout. Next, click on the Add a Gadget link.

Find the Follow By Email gadget and click the plus sign.

Next you’ll enter the title of the gadget (what you want the gadget to say on your blog). Blogger will give you what they call a FeedBurner URL. Click Save and voila! The only other step would be to arrange the gadget where you’d like to see it on your blog. So now, I can be followed by email!

Let me announce to you that TpT will be throwing a humongous Super Sunday Sale on February 3rd, Super Bowl Sunday. Everything in my store will be 28% off! WOW! One of the newest products that will be available is Valentine’s Day Frenzy:

It’s 170 pages of Valentine’s Day fun! There are Math, ELA, and fun activities that are mostly targeted to 1st grade and 2nd grade. I hope that you will check it out. I’d also like to tell you about my Mardi Gras Pack. Here in the south, we loooove Mardi Gras. Even if you do not have Mardi Gras where you live, it would be a nice cultural/regional learning experience for your students.

Have a great Tuesday afternoon!

Milestone Giveaway!

It’s my birthday and I’ll celebrate if I want to! That’s right! Today’s is my special day and I feel so blessed. Besides it being my birthday I’ve met a few wonderful milestones so I’d like to throw a huge milestone giveaway to celebrate.

Get this…I have over 75 products to give away. What? Yes! I have some amazing teacher authors giving away their best Teachers Pay Teachers products in this giveaway.

To enter, you must use the Rafflecopter tool and do what it asks. For the most part, you will be required to follow stores and blogs. Since there are so many wonderful people giving things away there are a lot of items to complete HOWEVER the more things you complete the more entries you receive. I am going to believe in the honor system with entries. If you’ve ever entered a giveaway, you know that it is possible to say that you’ve completed one the entries without actually doing what it says. The teachers-authors and I will be able to cross-reference entries to make sure that every entry was truthful. I hope that I’m not coming off as rude or offensive, I just want things to be fair for all. Does that make sense?

I have broken the items into 4 separate groups, so there will be 4 lucky winners for this giveaway. Each group has over 15 items that will be given away. The giveaway is live and it will close at 12:00 AM on January 28th.

Now I know you’re thinking: MrsMc please stop talking what am I going to win? Below you find a graphic of all of the items in each set, a listing of all of the items in each set, and the Rafflecopter tool to enter. Good luck and I will be announcing the winner one day after the giveaway is over. Make sure to tell your friends that MrsMc is having a major giveaway!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Mega Post: Pin Up Thursdays + Measurement Freebie+ New Products

Happy Thursday to you! Thanks to everyone who has linked up with my Then & Now Linky. It’s been fun to read and see how other TPT teacher authors have improved in creating their products. You can still link up here. I’d love to see your Then & Now comparison.

This post is a little lengthy but lots of fun! Here goes…

I’ve found some interesting pins this week on Pinterest…

The first thing I found was Spelling Battleship. It’s like the traditional battleship game, but spelling words or sight words are used instead. My kids love playing games to review things in class. I think we would have to play this game as a class a couple of times before I would let them play by themselves. However, I think they would really enjoy it.

The next is a helpful poster that can be used in the classroom to remind students to always produce quality work. This poster was created by rockin’ blogger Amanda.

I absolutely love this activity. Each snowflake has sight words typed in very small font. Using a magnifying glass, students find each word and write it down. This concept could be applied to sight words, spelling words, vocabulary, or anything. This was created by rockin’ blogger Katie.

Finally, a cute Valentine’s day craft that teachers could create for their students or that students could create for each other. My kids love getting cool pencils to write this, so I can definitely see this working in my classroom.

Moving right along…last week my firsties and I talked about measurement. We talked about inches and feet and what that meant. We watched a BrainPop Jr. Video about measurement. Then, I let the kids trace and measure their hands and feet (they loved it because they got to take off their shoes!). Throughout the week, we continued to talk about measurement. To mark the end of the week talking about measurement, I let the students trace each other. They then used rulers and calculators to see how many inches and feet tall they were. I had to help them with the calculations, but they caught on very quickly. They also had to compare their height with others in the classroom. They had to find someone who was taller and shorter that themselves.

This is the activity page they used. You can get it for free here.

After doing their calculations, they were able to color themselves. Again, more fun for them. For some reason though, some of my kids started coloring themselves unnatural colors like blue and green (see below). I had to remind them that their skin was not any of these colors. To which one student remarked that only aliens are those colors!

After putting it all together, here is the final product.

Lastly, I’ve added some new things to my store that you might be interested in…

Check out these products by clicking on the product images. I’ll give all three products to the first three people who leave a comment to this post! Don't forget to leave your email.

Whew, that was a lot for a Thursday!

Then & Now Linky Party

Let me first say that Teachers Pay Teachers has been such a wonderful resource for me. I have met several wonderful designers, I’ve used several great products from other designers, and I have been able to share my own teaching ideas with others.

I started my TpT journey over a year ago and I thought back to the earliest products that I created. Several did not have cover pages at all (what was I thinking? hey, I didn’t know better!) There were very few graphics as well, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about the needs of the teacher and the students. Now, I make sure my products have colorful cover pages, graphics throughout, and I think I am more thorough when it comes to explaining the various activities in my products.

In thinking about my growth as a TpT seller, I decided to host a linky party called Then & Now to compare our earliest products to our latest products.

Here is my Then & Now comparison:

If you’d like, link up with me and think back to some of the first products that you created for TpT. Then, compare them to the products you are creating now.

Here’s what you gotta do: Right-click and save the graphic below. Then open your favorite graphic editor and input your information. For the "then" item, it should be a product that you added to your store during your first months of selling on TpT. Likewise, your "now" item should be a product you've added to your store in recent months. Add your Then and Now graphic to a blog post and talk about it! After you complete your blog post, come back and add the link to your blog post so that we can read about your products then and now.

Hopefully this will be a fun trip down memory lane!

Grab the graphic above and don’t forget to come back and share your link below!

New Year…Clean Slate

I finally got my January bulletin board up for my classroom. I googled “January bulletin board ideas" because I am so lacking when it comes to thinking of ideas for my boards. I found this picture originally.

I have no idea where it’s from, so if you know I’d love to give due credit. Anyway, I liked this idea but I wanted to make it a little cuter. Also, I wanted it to be more personal to my students.

I gave my students construction paper to “create” themselves. They had a blast cutting out hair, eyes, ears, etc. Then we talked about what a new year’s resolution was. We brainstormed a few goals that they might want to achieve for the remainder of the school year. Each student wrote their goal on black construction paper. After helping them paste it all together and adding each student’s name, this was the end result…

I think it turned out really well. I even added myself to the board along with my goal for the rest of the year. Now, I have to start looking for ideas for next month’s board!

Friday Flash Freebie-Bingo

Happy new year! It’s been a while for me so, why not start with a flash freebie?

If you’ve ever visited my TpT store, you know that I have a collection of Bingo games. The Bingo games that I create allow the students to create their own cards by cutting and pasting. So today’s Friday Flash Freebie will be a giveaway of one the Bingo games in my store.

        

Using the InLinkz tool below, make sure to leave a working email address along with the name of the Bingo game you would like from my store. Don’t forget either one of these, because I won’t be able to send it to you! If you are not sure how to use the InLinkz tool, read this previous post here to help you. Please don't leave a comment in the blog post comment area if you are attempting to enter the flash freebie. Please use InLinkz.

The flash freebie will be available from 10:00 PM to 11:00 PM Central Time. Click here to visit my store so that you can choose a Bingo game. Enjoy!