I found the cutest Rudolph craft on Pinterest and I knew I had to have my students make it this week. (The inspiration was found on Fiskars.com, but the page is no longer available.)

We read the story Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by Robert L. May and then worked on our bags and a writing prompt. We are still in the process of working on our stories, but I'll post a picture when we finish. We added crumpled newspaper to our bags to make them fluffy.






The best thing about this project is that right before Christmas, I'm going to take the bags down off the bulletin board, take out the newspaper and put each child's Christmas present in the bag. That means, no wrapping presents this year!!! That is thrilling to me because it always takes me forever!

I love this idea by From the Pond! The mat was made for sorting colored pencils, but I could see myself having my students use it to make sure they don't have more than they need in their art boxes. Also, if they are missing a color, they can tell at a glance which one they need without me having to go through all their crayons. I love the idea that this encourages student responsibility and reinforces color recognition and one-to-one matching. :)

Please tell me I'm not the only one! :) 

Truly, there needs to be a 12 step program for the insanity that occurs when you have so many things you want to create and implement, but you don't get ANY most of them done because you're so busy gathering more ideas and trying to do too many things at once because you were inspired by something you saw on Pinterest or another teacher's blog! Wow! That sentence had a bazillion words in it! I think my teacher card may have just been revoked! Ha!

However, the best thing is that I love what I do and I feel blessed to have a job that allows me to challenge myself in so many ways. It's a great feeling to be truly inspired and to know that there are countless things that I can change or do to be the best teacher that my students need me to be.

So, no matter how much I may suffer from creativity ADD brought on by Pinterest and my fellow bloggy friends, I'm so glad that my inspiration cup runneth over!