Look what I made!

Happy Monday! I'm linking up with Fourth Grade Frolics today for the Monday Made It. I'm so excited to share my projects in my very first link up! (Hopefully I'm doing this correctly? Hmmm...)

Project #1 for Monday Made It -- I LOVED seeing all of the Teacher Toolboxes over the last couple of weeks. There are so many great tutorials out there--in fact, check out this post at Create.Teach.Share. She started it all! Here's how my little guy (girl?) turned out:

I have a navy, pink, and apple green theme going on next year--love those colors! Here are the labels I used:

I posted them on my TeachersPayTeachers site--grab them here for free if you're interested! There are also blank ones in the file.
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And now for Project Number Two...Back story--I was running late for a meeting and couldn't find my snazzy  teacher clipboard, so I hastily grabbed one out of the pile that my students use. During the meeting, I had to stand up and share some data regarding testing blah blah blah that I had clipped into the clipboard. I noticed several of my friends laughing at me when I was speaking, but I seriously thought they were just giving me a hard time because they know how much I hate talking in front of large groups. And I'm a teacher. I know--it's weird...So when I sit down, I give them the lovely "teacher glare". They cannot stop laughing and motion for me to turn my clipboard over so I can see the back. Y'all. There was a HUGE drawing in bright PURPLE marker of a boy's "special place". I'm not kidding--I was so embarrassed!! Ahhh--the joys of teaching middle school...Needless to say, the very first thing on my summer agenda was to get these clipboards covered! In dark colors! With so much shellac that they can't write on them if they tried!!

I painted the fronts of the clipboards using the little bottles of acrylic paint. I used painter's tape to make the designs, them I just painted different navy, white, pink, & green sections.

No worries if you get the paint on the silver clippy part. Just wait til it dries and then wipe it right off with water and an old washcloth. Easy peasy.

After washing away my mistakes (I'm a messy painter!), I sprayed those bad boys with several coats of acrylic finishing spray. 


Now for the fun part. I painted the backs of the boards with chalkboard paint! I'm going to use these instead of whiteboards next year. I just need to wait til the back to school sales start so that I can buy 15 more without breaking the bank! While I was painting, I remembered my grandmother (who taught second grade) telling me about getting one of those new "fancy" white boards in her classroom. She was so excited to get rid of the chalkboard, and all of her teacher friends were jealous because she was getting the very first one in the whole school! Fast forward 20 years, and now her granddaughter is purposely putting chalkboard paint on things because it's "so cool"! Too funny! Hopefully, the novelty of writing with chalk with excite my students as much as it does me!

And the final step...I added numbered labels to all of the boards so that I can catch future wienie writers  keep track of them. :) I  covered the labels in Mod Podge the labels in hopes that they will last a while. If you're interested, you can get the labels for FREE here. There are blank ones too!

What can I make now?? :)
~Ansley