All About ME!

Today I decided to blog a little bit about me so that you can get to know me a little bit better.

                                                             

This is a picture my sister (she's going into photography) took of me at the beach recently. I am 25 and live in the beautiful state of Michigan. (Side note if your from MI I would love to connect with you. PLEASE comment below.) This will be my third year teaching. I work as a classroom paraprofessional at a low income school. I love my job. I get to teach small groups in second, first, one in fifth and work with a second grade class. I started selling on TPT in January. I started my blog 3 weeks ago as part of the TpT sellers challenge and have been loving it.

My husband and I got married two years ago. He is an engineer and working on getting his  masters. We are very busy. We don't have any children yet, we would like to have children but we are very busy. :) We enjoy going to the beach, and chilling most of the time with our families.

When I'm not teaching or creating for TPT. I love to bake, cook and dance. I danced a lot when I was in school and have had to kind of let it go because teaching, being a wife, and creating has a way of consuming time. I enjoy letting it out once and a while teaching at camps or helping friends that do it more of the time. 

I hope you have enjoyed learning a little more about me. :) If you have a question or if you want to tell me a little bit more about you leave a comment. I love hearing from other teachers. 

Ellen 

Make your Masterpiece - Skip Counting Print and Go

Skip Counting Print and Go is finally done. I'm doing a happy dance. I started this product when I was teaching skip counting to my second graders back in like April. It was a perfect way to start getting them ready for multiplication. Now it is finally done. TPT Sellers Challenge was the perfect motivation to finish it this week. Now I'm linking up with these wonderful teachers for week 3.

Here is my masterpiece. Sweet Skip Counting Print and Go. I started this packet because I was teaching skip counting and I had just finished my Graphing Print and Go and it was really popular, so I thought I would try another print and go. I love this creation because it is really easily adapted to all levels. I started with a hundreds charts. I made two kinds of hundreds charts one that is already colored in and one that the students need to color in. 

I had my students color them in. Then I had them keep them in their folders for reference. The next thing in my print and go packet is an activity. The students can either use their chats, the cards provided at the end, individually or in a group. My students loved going around the group skip counting so I made this to go along with that. I had them count around the circle and write as they count.  There are two versions of  this activity as well. One is with some of the numbers filled in to help the students check as they go, and the other one is blank. The third activity is finishing the skip counting pattern. I gave them how much they are skip counting by and two numbers in the line but they aren't necessarily the first numbers, or two numbers next two each other. This can require students to skip count backwards, or forewords. This can be a real challenge for some students but it's good practice. 

                   

The last two activities are my favorite and my students favorites too. The first one is called "What's the Rule?". It gives students the first two numbers and they have to figure out the rule and finish the number line. The last activity is Spin and Count. The students spin a paper clip on the tip of their pencil. The number is lands on is the number they start with, then they skip count until they reach the end of the line.

      

The last thing I included is cards that have the numbers on them. I mentioned them above to use with the first activity. My first grade students love putting the cards in order. It's a great way to have them practice their skip counting and have fun at the same time. 

If you want to pick up this packet go to my TPT store.

I would love to give one away.....so my first blog giveaway.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Currently

Hi all - I'm linking up with Farley at Oh Boy 4th Grade for currently. I thought it would be a great link up so you can get to know me, a little bit more.

Currently I'm listening to Big Bang Theory. I love Big Bang Theory. I like to watch or listen to it while I work on my blog. My husband goes to work all day, so I like to listen or watch something while I work other wise it just gets too quiet around here. 

I am LOVING clip art. I think I love clip art a little too much. Now that I have gotten into the tpt creating world I am loving clip art and anything clip art related. I also love fonts, I am building up a huge stash, much to my husbands alarm. 

I'm thinking I really need to finish my skip counting print and go pack. It is huge for one thing and for the second I have been working on it since April and it's still not done. My goal is to have it finished by the end of the week so that I can use it for the #TPTsellerschallenge make your masterpiece. 

I am wanting to go to VEGAS with everyone else. I look at everyone else's blog posts and Facebook posts about going and I would love to be going with you guys. I also really want a good planner to organize my TPT and blogging stuff. If you have a good one to recommend PLEASE post a link or the name in the comments. I need some good recommendations.  

I need more clip art always, still working on my huge stash. :) I also need more time, I'm working a part time summer job, trying to blog, keep up with house work, make TPT products, work out, and spend time with people. I need more hours in the day. 

I am an All Star organizer when I want to be. I like to be organized at school, and with the stuff I'm working on...however at home I'm done organizing and I don't want to do it any more, so I'm a mess. Maybe I should need to put that on my needs list, I need to organize my home office. 

I hope you have enjoyed learning a little bit more about me. I can't wait to learn more about everyone else. 

Tell all Tuesday - Summer Flashback

It's tell all Tuesday! I was excited to see the topic for this week Summer Flashback. So I'm linking up with Teach Talk Inspire and My Day in K to tell you about some of my favorite summer memories. I am also excited to read some other fun summer memories.



My first summer memory is one of my favorites. It was in between my sophomore and junior years at college. One of my good friends and me decided we wanted to redo a ballet performance we  had done 2 times before. It was one we created off of the books The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. We also decided to be the two main characters, and pull it off in two weeks. I was the White Witch and she was Aslan the lion.  Here we are, got to love all the make up.



My second summer memory is my very favorite. 3 years ago my husband proposed. He did a great job, he took me to my grandma's house which is on the lake. Then we took a walk on the beach and when we got back a chair with roses had appeared on the beach. At first, I thought that it looked really cute, and I had no idea it was for me. Once I realized it was for me, I was super excited!!!!



These are my summer memories and pictures. If you have a blog you can link up, if you don't leave a memory in the comments!

Dare to Dream

Today I'm joining Third in Hollywood, Peppy Zesty Teacherista, Sparkling in Second Grade, and Teach Create Motivate for the TPT sellers challenge.This week the TPT sellers challenge is dare to dream. So I have been thinking about what I really want to do and where I want my TPT journey to go. It really went well with the other linky I did this week, teaches bucket lists.  

My first dream is to have a family someday. I would like to have kids and be able to stay home with them. My husband and I want kids and would like to have a family. However he is currently doing his Masters so we are waiting until he's a little closer to be finished. It will be nice to have a job I can do from home.

My second dream is to homeschool our children. My parents decided to homeschool me when I was little and although I didn't appreciate it all my life, I look back now and realize it was an amazing blessing. I would like to be able to give my children that blessing as well. It is actually one of the reasons  I wanted to be a teacher. I can't wait to create things for my kids to do.

My third dream is to travel. I would love to travel to anywhere and everywhere. I have been to a few places mostly inside the United State. I would love to see Africa,  Europe, and anywhere warm and tropical. It would be great to be able to go on one trip before we have children.

My fourth dream is probably the most important one to me. I really want to bless and inspire other people with my product. That's why I make things for other teachers that I work with. Also if they need something that I created I let them use it, because I work in an at risk school and they already put a ton of money into the students it's the least I can do.

I hope you have enjoyed hearing about my dreams. I would love to hear about your dreams. If you have a blog you can link up with the other teachers or you can leave them in the comments below.

Tell all Tuesday - Teacher Bucket List

It's my second day blogging, and so I decided to link up with a weekly linky party. It sounded fun to me. So I'm linking up with Teach Talk Inspire and My Day in K for tell all Tuesday. This week we are talking about your teaching bucket list.

1. The first thing I want to do is start a blog. I have really wanted to start a blog for a while now, and I just took the leap yesterday. I still have a lot of work to do. I really want to try to design my own blog so I'm going slow. I may have to cave a some point and get it designed for me, but I'm having fun so that's important. Plus I am learning about a whole new world.

2. My second bucket list item is to grow my TPT store. I just started it in January. I'm very excited. I have about 20 items in my store and almost 100 followers. I really like making items for my students. I also have a few teachers that will request items too. I would love to have more followers, and make more items.
 

Makeover Madness TPT Seller Challenge

Hello Everyone - 

This is my very first blog post. I'm so excited to blog about the first week of TPT Seller's challenge. 

I decided to makeover my first ever product. It was an 120's chart that a teacher in my school asked me make. I loved how it turned out the first time, and decided I should start my TPT journey with it.

 It started looking like this. I used all free graphics and had only bought one set of fonts at this point. At the time I thought it looked really good. Then I made it over - now it looks like this....

If you want to check it out go to my store. I love it because you can print them in color or black and white. I like to print the color ones and laminate them and keep them with my students for a reference when then need them. I use the black and white one to have students color.