Made It Monday!

I start back to school today - only meetings and such, but still, summer is over :(  But, I have several fun projects for today's Monday Made It hosted by Tara over at 4th Grade Frolics!

First up, last year I shared how I use the locker sized crates to store my composition books for math and my notebooks for writing. They are the perfect width to store either and can fit a whole class set! Here's what mine looked like after I fancied them up with some ribbon:

Source: herdingkats.blogspot.com via Nicki on Pinterest

Cute, right? But, way too colorful for my "Where the Wild Things Are" themed classroom! Obviously, I had to do something! My solution? Spray paint, new ribbon, and voila:

 
I think it's just as cute, and now it'll coordinate better with my room! By the way - it was way easier to spray paint these puppies than I thought it would be! Also, in case you're wondering, I just used a hot glue gun to attach the ribbon - I cut it to size, burned the ends to prevent unraveling and then hot glued it into place. The original ribbon held up for a whole year - I had to pull it all off before I repainted - so it's durable as well as cute!

Next up, name tags! Fran from Kindergarten Crayons made adorable freebie nametags that I loved! Unfortunately though, they just didn't go with my color scheme! Why do I always pick a theme that causes me so many problems?! I decided to make my own, using hers as my inspiration. Then I goofed and bought the wrong badge holders -I got vertical instead of horizontal! Well there was no way I was going to brave the customer service line to exchange them, so vertical it was!

Of course, as soon as I finished them I realized I was completely out of color ink - I almost made an emergency run to Walmart for more but it was 11:30pm and my husband has to wake up at 4:30am so I couldn't do that to the poor guy (he would stay awake worrying until I got home). Thus I cannot show you how they look printed out yet, but I'll pick up ink tomorrow after in-service (boo! hiss!) and get my youngest to model them for me, so check back tomorrow lol!

My sweet daughter has been creating for me too! She is loving making the toilet paper roll crafts and has added two Wild Things buddies for Max to hang out with:

Also, remember this?

Well, a little of this:

That's my daughter priming it with white primer, I'm so lucky she enjoys helping me!

Add some brown paint:

Hmmm, wonder what's next??? You'll have to wait for my classroom reveal post later this week to find out! Also revealed will be something special my husband has been working on for our hallway display - I am sooo excited to share it with you!

We have our Meet the Teacher night on Thursday and our first day of school is Friday! I can't believe I only have 4 more days! Summer went by way too fast - I'm not ready! I am going to be knee deep in lamination and last minute preparations for the rest of this week - hopefully I can get it all accomplished! 

By the way, guess who's workshop I get to go to on Wednesday for in-service? I'll give you a hint - her initials are D.D. and she's fabulously wonderful and will teach us all about doing Literacy Workstations the right way. That's right, Debbie Diller! I'm so excited - it's almost worth it being the end of summer just to attend that workshop!

All right, gotta go figure out what to wear! If you're not in school yet, enjoy your day. If you are in school, just survive it!