Five For Friday {My first!}

So one of my New Year's resolutions was to blog more this year. Oops.

BUT - this week, I decided that I will start blogging at least weekly, even if it's just a Five for Friday or small post. So here goes my first one! If I don't blog weekly, please email me and yell at me. Really. I need some tough blogging love. :)

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for my first ever Five for Friday!

So I've been working hours upon hours, days upon days (seems like years upon years :)) on my Time math unit trying to get it done. 

I am SO happy to report that I finally finished and posted it. Over 250 pages of telling time and concepts of time differentiated worksheets, centers, and activities - yikes! It's soo nice to have it done and polished though, and I am loving all of the activities so far this week. It's been added into the First Grade Math Units 10-18 Bundle so if you have that already, make sure you go download to scoop this up! I am currently writing a big blog post about all of the fun activities and centers in this new unit so watch out for that post either this weekend or early next week! 

EDIT: That post is now here: Telling Time Ideas and Activities!

Do you ever look at a pile of lamination or a fun activity and dread cutting it out? 

Does your normally loving husband/boyfriend/best friend stare daggers at you when you ask them to help cut something out?

If you've ever skipped doing a fun center because you just couldn't stand the thought of cutting it out, I introduce to you... cutting mats and rolly knife wheel things. Yes, that's what they're called: rolly knife wheel things. It said it on the box. (Okay, maybe I can't remember the name).

Mr. Giraffe started to complain that his thumb was going numb from helping me cut things out. Eek! Poor guy. So we invested in this a few days ago and and it's been great! The rolling thing can cut right against that ruler/guide so that your cuts are perfectly straight too. I'm one of those crazy people that cares how pretty and even things are when they're cut out. I know, I know. But I promise that my desk is a mess right now... and I'm horrible with a capital H (Horrible!) at keeping up with laundry. I pick my battles. :)

Anyway, I love this thing and I can't believe I didn't know they existed until now. And this picture is sort of a sneak peak of some of my time activities I'll blog about very soon!
EDIT: That post is up now! I wrote about it in #2 above! :)

So we've lived in our new house for about 6 months now and our front room was still empty until today. I mean EMPTY. All it has had in it for almost 6 months is a fish tank. Holding this guy:

Meet Oscar. He is an Oscar (we're super creative with names) that we've had for about 7 or 8 years and he's about a foot long! This isn't a very good picture of him with that thermometer blocking him but I snapped a quick one while we were putting things in the room because he was giving me a lot of attitude. I never knew fish had personalities until we got this guy. He has AT.TI.TUDE., let me tell you. If you come near his tank, he quickly whips himself back and forth, dives into the rocks, splashes around - basically, he's super friendly. We've tried to give him fish friends/tank mates. It didn't work out. (Don't worry, no fish were harmed in the friendship attempts).

ANYWAY! I found this teal ottoman a few weeks ago that I fell IN LOVE with and knew I had to have. I've always wanted our front room to be fun and have a fun pop of color so it was perfect. Since we finally had something to work around/somewhat of a vision for the room, we went to every furniture store in a 30 mile radius trying to find a white couch to go with it in the room. Did you know that white (not oatmeal) couches just don't exist? Or at least not here! After over 30 furniture stores (I'm serious) and way too many super stalk-y furniture salespeople, we finally both decided that nevermind, I can't look at another couch or salesperson or I'll cry, we'll just get a gray one and this one was comfy and on super, super sale so we grabbed it without even thinking just wanting to be done. But I'm excited about the room's potential! We still need to get the right pillows and end tables, chairs, decor, etc. but that can wait and I'm just enjoying having more than Señor Grumpy Gills in the room.

I know the room still needs a lot of work but I looove my ottoman.

The couch was delivered today so we went out and grabbed a suuuper soft white rug. I could lay on it all day. My diva girl cat took literally one step onto it and FELL OVER. Literally fell over and then rolled all around and rubbed herself all against it.

So I guess she approves.

This week has been all about OA and OW!

These are a few of the pages I've used from my OA & OW Worksheets & Activities Pack. It has over 60 OA and OW worksheets and activities that are completely no prep - you just print them out and they're ready to go! Sooo just in case you don't buy the fancy cutting mat I mentioned above, no big deal - none of these pages require any cutting. Cramped fingers rejoice! :) 

Speaking of my NO PREP packs I make for each phonics sound, I did something a little crazy this week.

I made a GROWING bundle of all of my current phonics no prep packs that I'll keep adding packs to until I hit the current file size limit. It will continue to be marked down 20% so each time I add a new pack, it'll go up a little bit to make it exactly 20% off. So basically the sooner you get it, the more you save. And since I still have quite a few packs to add to it, you'll be saving a TON getting it early. I mean, a TON.
EDIT: This bundle is now complete and is filled with so much phonics fun!! :)

So I know I create too many classroom items because I type my weekly grocery list in pretty fonts and label the world with cute clip art. It's a problem.

When my husband and I moved into our new house, we thought we were getting a dishwasher. And then we ran it. Water everywhere. So we had to go out and buy a new dishwasher. We love it but we're so used to the latch we had on our dinosaur old one. If the latch was to the right, the dishes had been cleaned. To the left, dishes were dirty. I'm always afraid to put dirty dishes in with clean ones and never know for sure if the ones inside have been washed (because we still wash them all before we put them in the dishwasher out of habit from our old one so they all look clean) or at least that's my excuse for not putting dishes in the dishwasher right away all the time.

So Mr. Giraffe said, "Can you make a little sign with cute clip art and fonts that says dirty on one side and clean on the other that can hang on the dishwasher handle?"

To which I obviously said, "YES!"

They only took a few minutes to make but you can have them if you'd like! Click {HERE} to download them!

Cut the page down the center. DON'T cut the dirty/clean apart. Laminate. Fold them in half. Hang on your dishwasher handle! Done!

Yay! My first Five for Friday post! I'm excited to read all of the others and hope I can actually keep up with my weekly blogging goal. Have a great weekend!

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