Parent Contact Log and Exit Slip Sheets

If you're any thing like me, keeping up with parent contacts can be one of the most tedious aspects of teaching. Part of my problem is major lack of organization. But it's also really hard when you teach 100 kids.  Hopefully, this sheet will help tremendously in the upcoming school year.

Parent Contact

I also created this exit slip to help me assess my students on a regular basis. It's so easy to just end a lesson with no closure. So one goal I have for this year is to do a better job of assessing how well (or not so well) my students understood the lesson. We'll see how it goes.

Exit Slip

Cute Storage Bins

I am redecorating my room this year and kept trying to find something cute to use for my classroom supplies. Everything I found was either too expensive or would cost too much money to spruce up and make cute. Then today I was at JoAnn's Fabrics and I came across these photo boxes that match perfectly with my color scheme this year.

They were only $4 a box and didn't require much decorating. Plus, teachers get a 15% discount at JoAnn's so they were even cheaper than that.

I also picked up a few sheets of scrapbook paper for the background and then printed out my labels on my printer.

I took a template that I had (yes, it's also my header on this blog) and used Picasa to add the text to the labels. Feel free to use the link below to get the template.

Blank Template

A New Blog

I've been blogging for several years now and absolutely LOVE it! It's so therapeutic and helps me to keep up with all the exciting things going on in my life...especially now that I have a little one.
My desire to start a second blog came from all the awesome elementary blogs I found while desperately searching for ones related to middle school. There are some amazing blogs out there with great ideas for teaching little kiddies but very few blogs targeted to upper grade teachers. My plan for this one is to document pictures, lesson ideas, bulletin boards, and all the other fun things that happen in a middle school classroom.
Hopefully you will be able to gain some inspiration from the ideas and pictures posted here. We don't start school for another 7 weeks but I'll try to post some summer projects I've been working on before then.