My Vistaprint Order Came In!!!

Yesterday, one of my favourite visitors came to the door yesterday ... the Fed Ex guy.  Back-to-school mode for me means a steady stream of delivery trucks to my door bringing all the goodies I've ordered for my classroom.

I used Vistaprint last year, and because I was a new customer, there were so many freebies to hook you.  And yes, I was hooked.  I didn't get as many good deals this time, but I love everything so much, I'm OK with that.

The large "listen to your teacher" poster is for the door.  LOVE it!  I had it made from a freebie I found at The Learning Tree and it's absolutely perfect!!!   The smaller "in this room" poster is from Venspired Learning.  I fell head over heels in LOVE with Krissy's posters over a year ago.  She has generously shared all of the beautiful and inspiring posters she has created HERE.  I also used her posters to create a wall calendar for myself.  I made one last year, too, and it was a hit with my students.  At the beginning of each month, we changed the month (page), and I put the poster under the ELMO to project it over the board.  We took a few moments to discuss the quote on the poster, and what it means to our own lives.

I also had these little library slips up from the business cards (sorry for the blurry picture).  After 12 years of teaching, I'm still trying to come up with a good system for tracking the books in my classroom library ... and not ending the year with less books than I started with.  When a student chooses a book, he or she will fill this card out and put it in their pocket on my library chart.  Seems easy enough and seems to work for our school library ... here's hoping it will work in my classroom.  ;)

But ... the best part is that I had posters made from some of my own work ... I've never made my own posters before (and to be completely honest, it may be a little bit pathetic how excited this makes me).  I had some of my posters from my writing units made into posters - one for summarizing and one for text features.  I also had my two self-reflection assessment strategies made into posters.  They will be great to post in the classroom at the beginning of the year when the students are getting used to these strategies.

Well, that's about all the treasures this cardboard box held.  Oh wait ... there was one more treasure ... a coupon for a percentage off my next order ... which just may happen ... very soon!