The Civil Wars (sniffle) and a Product Giveaway!

Good morning! I'm sitting here listening to the new Civil Wars album and practically crying cause it's so sad. Why must they be at odds? They are amazing. Anyone else out there lamenting this with me? Love them.

In other news, tonight is my first school event of the year - Kinder Curriculum Night. This first initial meeting is for parents only and we give them the lowdown on kindergarten. There is so much information for these newbie school parents that we made the event separate from Meet the Teacher night a few years ago and it made our lives so much easier! I'm delaying going into school and working since I have to be there so late... hence this blog post! ;)

The real reason I'm posting is to let you know that I am participating in a giveaway hosted by The Sassy Classroom, where you can win my newest product, Easy as ABC! {Alphabet Activity Pack}!

But that's not all! You can also win some great back to school products from 6 other great teachers, too! Click on the giveaway picture below to go check out a great new blog and enter to win some amazing products for the new school year!

Classroom Organization and Labels FREEBIE!

Have cobwebs collected on this little blog yet? Things are always slow going in the summer, but the first day of school is inching closer which means I've been hard at work preparing stuff for this new school year! One of my goals for this summer was to completely organize my classroom from top to bottom, so I went in extra early this year and began the long process of purging, giving away, and re-organizing every little thing in my classroom. You know how things always get worse before they get better when it comes to cleaning? Well, that was me, to say the least. Talk about piles everywhere as I took everything out of shelves and cabinets. It's taken a few weeks, but I am pretty much COMPLETELY done! It is such a good feeling! I've got one more week left before school starts, so I feel so happy that I can just focus on lesson planning, prepping things for my new class, and getting things ready for meet the teacher night... and NOT cleaning!

One of the things I did to help myself get more organized was create classroom item labels for things in my room. I love how they turned out! Here's a picture of some of my labels in action:

And good news! I've put them as a freebie for you in my TPT store! And, because I love you, if you plan on using the labels and find that you need one made for items in your classroom that are not included in the file, just leave a little comment/question on the product page for me and I will update the file (within reason) with the label you need.

Click on the picture below to get your freebie labels with a chalkboard flair! Hopefully they will make you feel as newly organized as they did for me. :)

Super Sale and Throwback Thursday!

Happy Independence Day! In celebration of America's freedom, I'm throwing a 20% off sale in my TPT shop for today only! Lots of other great bloggers are, too! Click on the button below to go straight to my store and check it out!

Credit: Ashley Hughes, KPM Doodles, Cara Carroll

I'm also linking up with Cara over at The First Grade Parade for Throwback Thursday! Read below for an old post from September 2012... there's a free labeling activity in there, too, so feel free to read and download!

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{September 2012}

Well, a month and a half into school and we have been rockin' and rollin' with ourselves! My class has been amazing and they keep impressing me every single day with their learning. I'm currently knee-deep in benchmark testing for the first time this year, but in the meantime we've been busy working on colors, beginning sounds, letters, writing skills, shapes, and counting. One thing I like to do to help my kids practice their early writing skills at the beginning of the year is labeling activities. I'll usually post the words either on the word wall, at the writing center, or on the whiteboard for the kids to use as references to label their pictures. For some reason, when we do these labeling activities, their handwriting turns out more beautiful than anything they've ever written before! I made up an activity sheet and matching word cards for our latest labeling activity we did this week using animal naming words. I hung up the four word cards on the board for them to look off of:

Then, using them as a reference, they labeled their animals on the activity sheet and then colored the picture.

You can download the animal naming words labeling sheet and word cards for FREE here on Google Drive (formerly Google Docs!): 

Animal Naming Words Labeling Sheet** (read note below about printing)

Animal Naming Word Cards

**One thing to note about the Labeling sheet - I made it to be printed on LEGAL-sized paper, so you'll have to manually go in on the PDF and change it to print on that size or else it will automatically print it to 8 1/2x 11 paper. Hope that makes sense! I wanted the kids to have as much room as possible to write their words.

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That's it! Click on the picture below to join in Cara's linky!