Monday Made It {FREEBIE Alert!!}

We've been busy since we returned from our week in Pennsylvania! OK, that's a slight mistruth: we have been busy being L-A-Z-Y. And it has been fantastic!

While we have spent a lot of time at the community pool these past few weeks, I did take the kiddos to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Cambridge, and it was incredible!

Sometimes, I forget that so much amazing history took place in my own backyard!

My kids worked hard while we were there to become Junior Rangers for the National Park Service. They loved every second of it!

If you're local {Marylander}, I strongly urge you to come and visit this amazing museum. I can't wait to take my students next year!

Our visit to the museum inspired me to download a few historical fiction books on the topic of the Underground Railroad {both of these books are carried in the museum's bookstore}:

I couldn't put this book down. It recently won the Pulitzer Prize, and I can see why!

This is the other book I bought. It is by the author who wrote The Girl With the Pearl Earring. It is written from the perspective of a Quaker who moves to Ohio from England. She is befriended by a milliner who helps to hide runaway slaves, but her brother is a slave hunter. It is powerful!

Even though I have been reading voraciously, I have, however, managed to tackle a few small projects for TPT and for my classroom.

I dragged the kids to Dollar Tree last week {that makes it sound like they went against their will, which is definitely NOT true...they LOVE Dollar Tree!}. We picked out all of the goodies for my students' birthday bags, and this afternoon, we put them together.

25 bags for $1.00?? Perfect!

I got all of these goodies for next to nothing!

I created these little passes to add to the bags, too. {I used to include Homework Passes. but I don't plan to assign formal homework this year} You can grab these freebies in my TPT store!

The finished product! Thankfully, Princess A loves helping me with school projects, and she helped me put these together.

I've also added few products to my TPT store lately. My favorite is my Transportation Tags and Display bundle, and it is only $2.50! Hopefully, it will help alleviate some anxiety during those first few days of school.

I was planning to create a desktop organizer for my laptop, using my new blog button, but I didn't like anything that I'd created. So, instead, I decided to customize my desktop icons, using Amy Groesbeck's incredibly easy tutorial. She's a GENIUS!

Cute, right???

So, that's what I've been up to! Time to go shuck some local sweet corn and slice up watermelon for dinner. Enjoy the rest of your week!

Monday Made It

Happy Monday! Life has been super busy lately, so I'll share a little bit about what I've been up to, and then, I'll let you in on some of the projects I've been working on.

First, do you notice anything different? MY BLOG!! My updated blog is up and running, and I am absolutely loving it! Not sure how the gals at Blogs Fit for a Queen knew my style so well, but they definitely hit it out of the park.

We just returned from a week in western Pennsylvania, visiting my husband's family. We did a lot of four-wheeling, critter hunting, sleeping, and reading.

Princess A and Deedle spent a lot of time, hunting for salamanders and crayfish in the "crick," and I had the chance to catch up some reading. I usually gravitate toward contemporary fiction, but when I took the kiddos to the library a few weeks ago, I picked up an historical fiction book on a whim.

I devoured this book, and as soon as I finished it, I downloaded another book by the same author about Benjamin Franklin. I'm halfway through it, and I'm loving it!

The night that we returned from Pennsylvania, we had to get ready for the flooring company to come the following morning to replace the floors in our family room and kitchen {this is a long overdue project that we've been putting off for awhile}. An hour into the job, we found out that we had a pretty significant leak under our house, so the flooring project had to be put on hold, and a plumber had to be called to repair the problem. We have had to wait an additional four days for a carpenter to come out to repair the damaged sub-flooring. In the meantime, my house looks like this:

I can't even. My refrigerator is in my dining room, and I can't find a doggone thing.

Thankfully, the floors will be finished tomorrow. I don't think I've ever been so excited about anything in my life.

The only thing that has kept me sane {and I use that term very loosely} while my house has been in upheaval has been creating things for my classroom and TPT store. Let me show you what I've been up to!

Click on the picture above to head over to 4th Grade Frolics!

Now that my blog is updated and looking adorable, I decided to dress up my TPT store. So yesterday. while my husband was diligently working on building our chicken coop {don't ask...that's another long overdue project}, I created a new banner for my store.

Then, I watched Christi's fantastic tutorial for customizing your TPT store. I struggled, I'm not going to lie. Playing around with HTML code is not for the faint of heart! I love how it turned out, though!

I also finished a product that I started while we were in Pennsylvania: my Back to School Pack!

The pack is fully editable, and this is what it looks like after it's been customized to meet your needs. It's black and white, but I like to copy it on Astrobrights paper to match my classroom colors.

I used to type out all of the Common Core Standards to send home to my students. What was I thinking??? I decided to create QR codes that link directly to the Common Core Standards website. {You can find my favorite QR code site here.}

I also decided to create transportation tags for my students to wear on their backpacks during the first weeks of school. They really help to alleviate some of the anxiety we feel during those first few days!

The tags come in a few different colors, and they are completely editable, as well.

That's it for me! Head on over to 4th Grade Frolics and check out what other teachers have been hard at work on this summer!