I *heart* Zip Ties

I was planning on posting last week with my Monday Made It being . . . I made it through the first day of school, but, as we all know, the first days of school are extra exhausting. I guess this Monday Made It is that I made it through the first week of school!

The first week just flew right by, and I hardly took any photos! But, I wanted to share a bit of what we have been working on. This is my first year attempting Reading Workshop. Last week my new 5th graders went through our classroom library and reorganized it by genre and type. I had to give a few mini-lessons, but they started to get the hang of it. I put some of the books back on the shelf and labeled the shelf with my label maker. I had also bought some little baskets from the Dollar Tree to hold small bundles of books. We managed to find a lot of books that could be categorized by author too!

I whipped up some simple labels and then attached them to the baskets with one of my favorite classroom tricks...zip ties! You can get a colorful bundle from Dollar Tree with two sizes included. These are PERFECT for attaching labels to baskets. I've had some on baskets for years with no sign of breaking!

Labeled book bins at the top, and student book boxes and Reader's Notebooks in the shelf. 

Some books grouped by author. Tags attached with cheap zip ties! 

Some of our series books, on the shelves, labeled. 

A close up of one of those amazing zip ties!

Another Monday Made It - a simple wooden sign. I forgot my wall is white, so I guess I need to paint it again in another color!

And of course I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics and her awesome Monday Made It Linky!

SignUp Genius - Scheduling Made Easy

Have you used SignUp Genius yet? It is a great tool to help organize and go paperless (and headacheless)! We recently used SignUp Genius school-wide for parent teacher conferences and it was so much easier than our old way of scheduling. Once I set up my conference page with time slots I sent it out to parents and let the sign ups roll on in. There were only a few parents that I had to remind or talk to personally to help them get scheduled, but it was nice to have something so handy!

Recently I've been distraught when I see the snacks and lunches that my kiddos bring. I've always stressed the importance of bringing fresh fruit/veggies as a snack instead of pre-packaged/processed junk, but few do. So, I decided to declare next week, our last week before spring break, "Share a Healthy Snack Week". It took mere minutes to set up a SignUp Genius page and email it out to parents, and within an hour I already had two parents signed up.

SignUp Genius is very user friendly. You can create a group and add all of your parent emails, they are saved for any future sign-ups. Creating a sign-up is easy, just follow the steps and you can sit back and watch the notification emails roll on in. It's also easy to send out reminder emails to those who have not yet signed up.

For parent teacher conferences I was able to easily print out a copy of the schedule to stick on my door and to keep handy while meeting. You can even send the paper copy to any families that may not use email. Oh, and did I mention that SignUp Genius is totally free? Well it is! Tell me how you use this awesome tool!

***I have no affiliation with SignUp Genius other than as a happy user***