Made It Monday - Readbox

Once again, I'm linking up with Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics for Made It Monday.

I have been enjoying checking out everyone's Made It Monday posts for the last several weeks.  My classroom is starting to look like a Pinterest Board exploded in there, and now everything I look at seems to need a makeover!  Soon I may need intervention....

 

So excited about my Readbox.  When I saw this, I thought it was the cutest idea ever.  The person who came up with this idea should feel honored to see how it's now all over.  At first, I couldn't see how it could possibly work with my long shelves of chapter books with book baskets on top.  Then, DING, the bell went off.  I have another bookshelf that I use for my literature group book sets that would be perfect.  Sadly, I didn't take a before pic, but here's how it came out.  Unfortunately, the copiers were down, so I don't yet have the sign I made for the middle.

 

I spray painted the bookshelf, used red paper on the wall, and used Washi tape at the border for decoration.  The book baskets were already red, and I was surprised how close all the reds were.  I used our Ellison die to cut out the letters, and used a spray on adhesive.  The curve at the top was trickier.  My daughter and I projected the image onto my Smart Board, I traced and then cut out.

 Our new series has some pretty tough vocabulary words, which is nice from the way-too-easy words of our last series.  I'd been debating some sort of a word wall for this year.  What I ended up with is a vocab wall (bulletin board on the right).  I plan to put the current week's words (plus any others that we may choose) in the top section of the grid by part of speech.  Then each week, words we choose to keep around for a bit will be moved to the lower section.  Once we feel we've got a word down pat, it gets "retired."  These words will be put onto popsicle sticks for our Looney sticks game to use for Friday's flex day.  More to come on that later.  I'm also thinking about letting students put a star around a word if they use it, or find it in a text.  I'll have 3 different classes, so I'm not quite sure how that would work yet.  But happy about how the board came out.  Michaels had all their teacher stuff 50% off, and then I also JUST found out that you can get another 15% off if you show teacher ID.  So, I got these chevron letters and all new borders.

 

I actually made this product earlier this year to help cover the 4th grade "grade-level spelling" standard.  We still gave spelling tests (changing that up this year though!), but I never felt that the traditional spelling tests are any indication of spelling ability, more like memorization ability.  So I made this task card set to help assess.  As I made it I thought that it would be great to use this at the beginning of the year as a preassessment, and then again towards the end.  So it's in my plans to use in the coming weeks, plus I'll use it as an introduction to using task cards in my room.

There are 28 cards with common 4th grade spelling words, with the last 8 cards getting a little tougher (ex: beautiful and favorite).  This set is $2.50, but I've just marked them down for $2.  You may also want to check out my FREEBIE on using task cards, or my bundle that has 8 sets of task cards designed for 4th grade for $8.  Unlike some others who make their cards for grades 3-5 to make more money, I design my products specifically for 4th grade!

FREEBIE in my TpT store.

My bundle of 8 sets of task cards

School officially starts for me next Monday, but I have school obligations everyday this week except for Wednesday.  That's one of the reasons I wanted to get a jump start on my room.  Well, maybe it's more of an excuse for me anyways, I really just was excited to implement some of the great ideas I've been getting from all of the bloggers I've been following.