Fabulous Find Friday: Countdown to the Classroom

This Friday I'm linking up with Fun in Room 4B and sharing a couple of things from this past week that I am so excited about.  I have done a lot of school shopping.  What is it about glue sticks and dry erase markers that make me want to clear the shelf?  

Okay, here's part of my shopping for this week:

The travel pillows are from Walmart's clearance.  They happen to match my new chair, 2 metal big tubs, and my beach towel from Target's clearance.  $4 each and will compliment the t-shirt pillows I made.  

This pile of stuff came from Michaels.  The baskets were 70% off plus my teacher discount - so between $3 and $5 per basket.  Everything else was 99 cents in the scrapbook area.  Those black things are each a 15 pack of greeting cards - perfect for cutting in half and using to frame student pictures.  There are 2 other packs of card stock, and those red things are each a 50 pack of bookmarks.  Just plain colored bookmarks that I will use to stick my library labels and book bin labels on before taping inside my plastic shoeboxes.  The other thing is colored filler paper.  I saw them and remembered junior high with writing notes on colored paper.  Ahh, memories...  I'm planning on organizing my whole class notes for Math, Social Studies, Reading, and Science using the colored paper in my example binder.

This pile of stuff came from the Dollar Tree.  I have one plain wall at school, and though I'm planning on using it for my Math anchor charts, I still really want some color to back it up and to hide the yucky walls.  So, I turned to yellow plastic tablecloths.  Pinterest has said that plastic tablecloths don't fade, so I'm going to try it out this year.  If it doesn't work, then I'm only out $6 - and I probably didn't even need 6 of them.  The red tablecloths are going to become a valance of sorts above my 2 windows.  The little trophies will become awards from the clean desk fairy and the cursive fairy.  The foam blocks will become more dice to play a bunch more math games.  

I also wanted to share my tech page on Pinterest - lately I keep finding so many wonderful apps and websites to use in the classroom.  Maybe one of the things will help you as well.  I had every intention of just picking one thing, but there really is a lot of great things out there from downloading You Tube videos (if it's blocked at school), to easy graders, to Reading Rainbow, to Bill Nye, to organizational stuff.  Enough said, here it is:  

http://pinterest.com/esumma/tech-stuff

Okay, okay - it's already Friday!  We are able to get our school keys next Tuesday, July 31st.  The school dreams have already started, and I'm so ready to be able to have my dining room back to being a dining room rather than a craft/organizing station.  My boys have chosen their new backpacks and lunch boxes for this new year, and it's starting to feel like it should be time to start setting everything up.  I really do love summer, I just really love the beginning of school too!