I'm Back!

Oh my goodness! I can't believe I've been gone for a year! I wanted to take a quick second to give an explanation as to why I disappeared and let all of you know what I've been up to. And, of course, I'll throw in some pictures of a cute new bulletin board I constructed this week! 

Let's just get into it, shall we? Here's the short version: In May of 2016 I was working as an 8th grade honors English teacher at a junior high and decided I needed a change (for multiple personal and professional reasons). A position for a freshman English/yearbook/journalism teacher at the high school next door opened up and I knew it was where I needed to be. So, I put myself out there and took on an absurd amount of responsibility for the 2016-2017 school year. I taught three sections of freshman English, helped my section of yearbook students produce a 364 page award-winning yearbook, and helped grow lead our tiny and very new journalism program. Needless to say, it was a very exhausting, crazy, and super rewarding year. Of course, I have tons of new things to share with all of you now that I'm teaching a new grade level and additional content areas. I'm so excited get back to blogging and collaborating with all of you!

Anyway, as promised, I wanted to share a fun little bulletin board idea in this post too! My publications kids (yearbook and journalism sections combined) have been working on ideas to get the student more involved in our program, so I decided to create an interactive hall bulletin board. I'm going to be honest, my brand new Cricut Explore Air 2 (not a sponsored post, I promise) and my teacher's aide made this project a super easy task. However, I'd imagine that this project would still be super quick and easy sans the fancy cutting machine and extra help!

I started out knowing I wanted to do something with the idea of "paying it forward," and I really love that saying, " spread kindness like confetti" that has been crazy popular lately so I decided to mix them together. I had my TA cut out rectangles of of cardstock to be the oversized confetti pieces and then we came up with an assortment of acts of kindness on some of them. Next, I had my Cricut cut out the bulletin board lettering in plain white cardstock and purchased a square yard of fabric from the craft store.

I then took two seconds to type up some contest rules/instructions and had my TA hang everything up! Essentially, the directions instruct students to take a piece of confetti off the board, have someone take a photo of them completing the act of kindness on the confetti, post the photo and tag our publications accounts on social media, and be entered into a drawing for a gift card.

Beyond being super cute, the bulletin board creates a positive message that we're spreading on our campus of almost three thousand high school students, and who doesn't want that?! Anyway, that's all I've got for today! Please keep a look out for more to come very soon and subscribe!