Back to School

This is my last week of summer vacation.  I go back to work on Monday.  This summer seems to have lasted longer than others, yet I'm still not ready to go back.  This school year is looking to be one of the hardest, most work intensive ones yet.  I'm going to work on my National Board Certification.  I'm still not sure why I decided it was necessary to devote 200-300 hours of my life for this, but it looks like I am.  Three other library media specialists in my district are doing it as well as a CA teacher in my building.  So if I'm going to do it, this is the year to do it.  I just have to keep reminding myself that it is only one year of my life.  We will see how I feel in April when it's all over!

In an effort to prepare of back to school I started thinking of what I wanted on my main bulletin board this year for the first day back.  I was trying to think of something new and came across an idea using owls.  Owls are "the hot thing" right now when it comes to decorating.  Pottery Barn Kids is full of them.  I came up with the slogan "Whooo's looking for a new book?" and thought I would use owls for the decoration.  Carson Delossa actually has many owl bulletin board sets, so I loaded all 3 kids up in the mini-van and headed out to US Toy yesterday.  Now, if you've never been to US Toy before you have no idea what taking 3 little kids there is like.  It's full of tons of crafty, teachery stuff as well as every little toy trinket you can think of .  This place is bigger than a football field.  My girls were in heaven.  I did preface the visit by telling them we were not buying anything for them.  The last thing they need is another string of beads or anything else for dress up. 

After walking through the entire store 3 times we found none of the owls we were looking for.  They had some owl stuff, but not what I was wanting.  I did find some cool letters that I can use at some point during the year:

At least I got out of there without spending more than $20.00 which is unheard of for me.  That's one good thing about not being a regular classroom teacher anymore, I save a lot of money on classroom decoration crap!

I decided I could make my own owls using my scrapbook paper so went to searching online for ideas.  I came across this:

Exactly what I was wanting.  After cropping, resizing, etc. on the computer I decided this was way more work than I wanted to spend on a bulletin board.  So...I started searching cricut cartridges online.  I might was well put my cricut to use!  And, I found this:

PERFECT!!!  and only $14.99.  Ordered it online and should have it by next week, just in time!

I think we can call yesterday a success!