Spotlight Saturday 8-29-15

Happy Saturday everyone!! I have survived the first four days of kindergarten!!! I am excited for the new year, and yet completely wiped out!! 

Teaching kindergarten while still very much in the healing process has definitely been trying for me!! I honestly fall asleep on the couch every night as soon as I get home, and today I've spent most of the day snoozing!!! Guess my body needs the rest in order to help the healing process!! 
Anyway, it's time for my

I get so excited to read the different Spotlights of others who have linked up! I'm so glad for this Teacher's Show and Tell where we can help each other to find incredible ideas and products for our classrooms that can make our lives easier and more awesome!

Like most teachers, I am obsessed with different bags and bins I can use for storage. This addiction has led me to become collecting various Thirty-one bags and bins. Recently my Thirty-one representative shared this image with us.

I was immediately intrigued!! I love the Black Playful Parade pattern, and the fact that I could use Sharpies to create my own unique style was just too good to pass up!!

I bought five of the Black Playful Parade Oh Snap Pop-up bins. They looked like this before I started to get creative.

They have snap hooks that can be used to hang them up or to snap them together. I have an idea in mind for ways to use them in my classroom, and as soon as I'm done coloring them I'm going to test it out. If I can get it to work, I'll definitely share pictures with you all!!

I found some awesome Sharpies on sale and scooped them up, because they were huge packs with so many awesome colors!

I got excited about this pack because of the five new colors that it included!!! You know you're a teacher when you get excited about brand new colors of Sharpies!! (Please ignore the Flair pens, I didn't use them to color the bins but this was the only pic of the Sharpies I have!)

I also had my trusty 24 count Sharpie pack. I now have doubles of most of the colors Sharpie makes, and that's just fine with me!!  You can also see the stash of Oh Snap bins I bought in order to color them all in. I LOVE to color, and this activity got me really excited to try it out!!

After I finished the first one I completely fell in love with it! It was so much fun to color in the pattern, and I got to be as creative as I wanted! Sometimes the colors bled together, but that doesn't detract from the overall awesomeness. It actually makes it more personal. I got so excited after finishing the first one that I immediately opened up another. Guess what I found out??

I quickly realized that each bin was cut from the same pattern of cloth, but each bin was made up of different sections of that cloth. So that means that while each bin definitely matches the other, they are all slightly different depending on where they were cut from the pattern. This made me even more excited, since that meant all of my bins were going to be different and yet would still match each other perfectly!! You can tell what I mean from this picture. Each of these three bins shows the same spot on them, and you can tell how different each pattern is from the other!! Awesomesauce!!!

I'm currently working on finishing up bin 2 of 5. Check out this awesome Fire Flower I made!! Reminds me of playing Super Mario Bros. and getting Mario his Fire Power!!!

I'm really having a great time coloring all of these bins, and it's super relaxing after a long day at work! The marker fumes can be a bit intense, so I would recommend taking several breaks when the smell gets too strong. Also, be careful when coloring in the thinner lines. The marker ink tends to bleed a little bit, and it could seep into a white area near where you're coloring. I don't mind when that happens, because it it just another little piece that makes my bins even more unique!!

What are some of your favorite bins or bags that you use as a teacher? If you're interested in a project like this, I can get you in touch with my Thirty-one rep if you don't have one of your own. There are several black and white patterns you can choose from, and they come on all sorts of different bags and bins. You don't have to get the Oh Snap bins if you don't want them. I have a friend whose daughter got a lunch box and had a great time coloring it in!

Now it's your turn to link up and share the Spotlight with us! Feel free to use either of these Spotlight Saturday images with your post. If the person or company you are Spotlighting has a Facebook page, leave them a message to let them know you Spotlighted them!! 

Rules:

1) You need to spotlight an educational resource that either you have created or you have found from someone else and love! This means you must link up with a blog post you have written putting an activity or idea in the Spotlight. Please do not link directly to a product in Teachers Pay Teachers or Teacher's Notebook or similar sites.

2) If you are Spotlighting a product from your own TPT store or that of another seller, make sure that in your blog post you Spotlight a freebie or a paid product. If you have a freebie and a paid product from the same seller, feel free to use both in your post. If all you have is a freebie, then post about the freebie and how you used it. You can also Spotlight a freebie that someone else created along with a product that you created.

2) Make sure to give credit where credit is due! You will need to include the name of the creator as well as a link to their TPT or Teacher's Notebook store where others can get a copy of the resource as well.

3) Include pictures of the product in your post, either screen shots  or photographs of your kiddos actually using the product. Give us a snapshot, just a brief glimpse into how the product or activity works. Just an image of the cover and one of the pages you have listed in the preview of the activity on TPT would be fine. It gives readers a visual and helps them better understand what your product is all about.

4) Make sure to leave a comment on the post of the two people before your post and the person after. This will help get conversation rolling, and will make sure everyone feels recognized for their efforts!

5) This is not the place to share your frustrations or disappointment with an activity or how you would have done it differently. If you are unsatisfied with your purchase that is a private conversation you need to have with the seller via email. This is not a link up to bash any sellers or their products, and any posts like that WILL BE DELETED!!

6) Follow my blog with Bloglovin' to make sure you are kept up to date on all the latest link up additions. Don't forget to follow my Facebook page too to keep up with all the notifications I send out!

7) To Link Up, you will need to click on the small blue button underneath my closing signature. It is directly under my name on the left hand side of the blog.