The Organization Continues...

If you didn't take advantage of the huge Mailbox sale a few weeks ago, I am afraid you might have missed something pretty spectacular. As a rule, I typically avoid indulging in every sales email flier I receive. However, when a sale boasts, "Buy 1, Get 3 Free," that is a pretty tough one to resist! I am so glad I didn't just click "delete" this time!

I realize that the sale items were not among the "Common Core Aligned" selection, but I thought I would take a chance and just align them myself. So I selected four theme kits, all of which contained activities that are already laminated (that alone makes them more valuable, right, teachers?!?).  

I selected themes that I knew would fit into my instruction at some point throughout the year.

Each kit was full of activities. These came from the "Insects and Ocean Animals Kit."

I went to work, cutting the already laminated activities, organizing them into bags, and labeling the bags with skills that correlate with our pacing guide.

Then, I filed the activities away into my new file system! (If you missed my post explaining my organizational method, you can read all about it here.) I am so grateful to have these hanging files organized!

 

These are the completed cut, bagged, and labeled centers that came from just one theme kit. This kit contained ten in all!

So, each kit contained ten centers, which gave me a total of 40 new, already-laminated (can you tell that's important to me? haha!) centers to use in my classroom this year.  

Would you like to hear the best part? I paid $10 for one kit, and the others were free. So, basically, when you factor in the shipping and handling charges, I paid a grand total of $15 for everything. I am beyond thrilled! I really was grateful to receive these, because many of the centers in the kits fell under standards for which I was a bit weak on center options. I feel so much more prepared now. :)

If you aren't subscribed to the Mailbox, I would highly recommend it! All of their new books are common-core aligned, and there really are some awesome resources available on the web site as well.