So I Guess You Could Say It's Getting Pretty Serious...

Ohhhhhhh my golly good gosh!!! When summer hits Jenn, it hits her HARD!

It has been a whoppin 75 days since I lasted posted anything on here. In those 75 days I managed a money-draining trip to Las Vegas, a good old fashion trip to the lake, and a trip to St. Louis. Needless to say my funds are beginning to grow bone dry. However, I have been having a BLAST! I deemed this summer to be the last summer I have (at least for awhile) to spend my money a little irresponsibly. After I start my big girl teaching job this August, my big girl pants will go on and stay on!

Now, despite having a summer of fun, I have been working on getting prepared for the school year as best as I can. To give you an idea of some of the things I have accomplished so far, I decided to take part in Tara's (from 4th Grade Frolics) wonderful Made It Monday linky!

In attempt to familiarize myself with the curriculum and standards that I will need to follow this year, I decided to put together a "Curriculum" binder. It has my districts year-long curriculum map and goals for my kiddos for every subject in each quarter. Some of it will be subject to change in the coming months, but this is just a start!

This is something I have worked pretty hard on for quite some time. A few months ago I bought a teacher binder template from Keri Brown's TPT Store over at Enchanted Kindergarten and spent a lot of time editing and adding pages to suit my style and needs (Click here to read my blog post about the struggles I overcame editing this wonderful notebook!) I have finally printed it all out and got it organized in a cute little binder. I am so excited about having this resource to keep myself organized all year. I just hope I consistently make myself use the darn thing! ;-)

This is an organizer I bought from Office Max (only my color combinations were a bit different. You can pick and choose how you want to put it together). I made small labels for each container and filled it with those items. I was pleasantly surprised by how much actually fit in each little container!

This is a set of drawers I bought at Walmart to store my brag tags. I labeled each drawer by category and put the brag tags inside. That way when a student earns one, they will be easy to find!

The last item that I am SO excited to check off my To-Do list are the brag tags themselves. This took me FOREVER to finish (as in I just finished them today and started them back in April). I designed each brag tag myself, printed them on card-stock, laminated them with my brand new fancy Scotch Laminator (you can purchase one for yourself on Amazon. It was not too expensive and it was TOTALLY worth it!), and cut each one out.

I have all of the ball-and-chain necklaces ready for the kiddos, I will just need to hole punch the tags. However, the idea of sitting and individually hole punching each tag sounds about as fun and stimulating as watching paint dry. Therefore I decided that instead of doing them all now, I will hole punch them as I give them out! :-)

I still have a lot of things to do to get ready for the school year, but I am so happy to be done with these items specifically. The beginning of the yea is creeping up on me, seeing as I attend my first training session next week...

August 12th is coming WAY faster than I had anticipated. I CANNOT wait to meet my firsties! :-)