I've been a busy little bee tonight...

Ok, let me get my bitching out the way first, so I can get on with the rest of this post. Why in the HELL was it in the 70s today!?!? They're predicting record breaking high temps for Wednesday. Why, oh why!? Well, at least I won't have to turn the heat back on this week, right? The 10 hours I had it on over the weekend was enough for me. Oh, wait! I'm listening to the news right now, and the weather guy just said "things will be going downhill after Wednesday." We're supposed to get a "big chill" next week. Ah...ok...all is right with the world again. Well, at least MY world. ;-)

Now, on to the rest of this boring post. I made a couple of things for school today that I thought I would share. (Gee, can you tell it's NaBloPoMo?) This first one is for my buddy, Suz. We have some basic school rules at the Hell-Hole. There are signs hanging all around the building that say, "Be safe. Be respectful. Be responsible." We recently added these three rules to our morning opening exercise, right after the Kids At Hope Pledge. Well, those rules lent themselves perfectly to the following:

Have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE my laminator? Oh, and Print Shop Deluxe. Yep, love that, too! I found the bee in a kit I bought from Scholastic that's nothing but patterns. These turned out cuter than I thought they would. I can't wait to hang them up tomorrow.

These next cuties are for a literacy center that I'm putting together. It was an idea I found on a website that was created to go with our reading series. The center/game is called "Click It." There was a page you could print out to make little cameras. But, remarkably, we had this cute little camera die for our die cutter. I couldn't believe my luck! Nothing to copy, nothing to cut out. (well, ok, I did have to cut them out after I laminated them, but at least I didn't have to cut them out twice.) Just put the paper on the die and run it through the machine. I was able to do 4 at a time. I made 12, but now I'm thinking I may just make enough for the whole class later this week. I love how the laminating film makes the perfect little window. The idea behind the game is that you make circles (the same size as the camera lens) with whatever words you're working on, and you spread them out on the table. Then, you call out a word, and the children "take a picture" of it by putting their camera over it, so the word shows in the lens. Cute, right? You can make one set of words for each child, or just one set, and give a point to the first child to find it. I hope the babies like it.

One more center/game from that website. I can't remember what they called it. Flip It?


These are going to be pancakes. (Again, a page was available to print and cut out, but why, when the die cutter will make perfect circles?) On one side, you put the words you want to work with. I love that you can write on the laminating film with a Vis a Vis marker, and then just wipe it off, so I can use the same pancakes over and over every week, and just change the words. You put all the 'pancakes' down on the table (or, we'll probably play this on the carpet) with the words face-down. Then, the kids take turns using a real spatula to 'flip' a pancake. If you can read the word, you get to keep the pancake in your stack. If not, you return it to the table. When the words are all gone, the person with the most pancakes wins. I'm thinking of eliminating this aspect of the game, though. I did print out the recording sheet that went with this game. It has a series of circles (pancakes) on the sheet. After the pancakes have all been claimed, the children then record their words on the sheet. This sheet will then serve as the assessment piece for this center. Again, cute, right?

Wow, it's way past my bedtime. This time change has completely screwed up my internal clock. I still haven't changed the clock in my bedroom (I'm gonna do it as soon as I hit publish, I swear!) so when I woke up and saw the clock read 4am, my first thought was, "oo, but now it's really 3 am, so I can still sleep for a couple of hours! Yeah, well that happened about every 30-45 minutes after that until I finally just got up around 5:30. I'm not exactly sure how I'm even awake right now. I think writing this gave me my second wind, since I could barely make it through Dancing with the Stars, which you know I heart big time!

Oh my hell, I have Nightline on right now, and they're doing a story about some cockamamie 'camp' that is supposed to help gay men turn straight. What the actual fuck?!? This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever freakin' heard of!! It's called Journey Into Manhood. And, you know what, that's all I'm going to say about it because this bullshit doesn't deserve anymore of my time.

On that note, I'm putting my completely irritated ass to bed.