Genius!

Have you heard about Sign Up Genius?

 

 

It is an electronic sign up sheet.  You can use it for classroom parties or parent teacher conferences.  I'm planning on trying this out in my classroom this year.  It was really easy to use and in a matter of minutes I had my class party sign ups finished.  My plan is on parent orientation night when parents sign in to ask for their e-mail.  I'm going to e-mail them that night from Sign Up Genius.  If it doesn't work or I am one short I'll send out a letter later in the year that says we need this for our party.  I'm thinking for the parent that can't make it that night this might be helpful!  Did I mention it will send a reminder e-mail before the event to remind the parent that they signed up!?  How awesome is that!? I thought I would show you step by step instructions so you can see how easy it is!

 

 

Step 1

 

Sign up! 

 

I think this is pretty self explanatory and doesn't really need any help.

 

 

Step 2 Click on build a sign up and choose school of course!

 

 

Step 3 Choose what kind of sign up you want to do I'm going to show you how to do a party sign up!

 

 

This part is where you create a group I already had one so I just used it (it saves it for you!)



You can choose a theme and I just chose Halloween! It has several different templates that you can choose from or there is even an option to upload your own photos!

Choose your Time Slot

Give your slots names choose how many you want of each. 

After you do that It will give you these choices.  This is where the choice for the reminder e-mail is!  This is probably my favorite part of this site!

Once you've finished click on the proceed to invite and publish if you are happy with how it looks.

You can enter your e-mails now and send them out. Oh but wait it's summer and you don't have those parent emails...DON'T WORRY click save as a draft for later!

There is the sign up we just did plus my sign ups I created last week!  I'm all set once I get the emails I'll enter them and publish it! 

Hopefully this will be a useful tool for the upcoming school year.  I hope you have found this information useful and will be able to use it for the upcoming school year! 

Childrens Book Linky

So I changed emails on my blog and in the process lost all of the blogs I follow in my reader :( So if you wouldn't mind comment with a link to your blog so I can start following again! I am linking up with DeAnne at First Grade and Fabulous for a linky! This happens to be one of my favorite kinds because I am slightly addicted to finding cute books for my classroom.  I've also recently started collecting childrens books that have Boston Terriers in them.  I was super excited when I found the Penny series!!

 

 

On the first day of school I like every teacher in the world on this day goes over their classroom rules and expectations.  That's whenever it is fun to bring in everyone's favorite troublemaker David!

 

 



 

I like to do a little craftivity I've stumbled across with him and we discuss what rule is the most important to us in our classroom.  What we could say to David to remind him to stay on the right track, etc. 

 

I use several picture books throughout the year to do various concepts in my class this is the main one I use the first week.  I've seen so many great books I'll probably end up picking up a few more. 

 

I hope ya'll had a relaxing weekend!

 

 



 

It's Been Awhile

So I haven't blogged in a long time and I have felt kind of lost without it. I haven't even been reading other teaching blogs! Zip Zero NOTHING since November! I feel like I've been unmotivated this school year took a lot out of me emotionally. I adjusted to a new school with a different type of child that what I have encountered in the past. I think I lost my fire this past year and I'm going to try to reignite that fire this year. I'm looking forward to a new crop of kids and I've changed from my fireflies back to my Monsters. They made me smile so much in the past so I'm going to try again. The bad news is, is that Mardels decided to discontinue carrying a lot of the Trend Furry Friends Items that they had. The good news is, is that now I'm creating a lot of things that I will share with you! I'm going to be adding more here and there but I thought I would start with something simple and basic for my first post back.

We use the smaller envelopes to send home report cards in every six weeks. We laminate these and put these on the back. Once the parent has viewed the report card they sign the sheet next to the number of the six weeks that it is, and return the envelope. Then it's ready to send home the next 6 weeks. Yes it's something to keep up with but it is a way to CYB (cover your booty). With the first six weeks report card I also remind parents that a great way to keep track of their child's progress is by signing up for the Parent Portal then they can view their child's grades and keep up with it much easier! I will be sure and post more goodies later and hopefully share some of my insights from the past year. I hope everyone has a fabulous weekend!