“Giftedness is not what you do or how hard you work. It is who you are. You think differently. You experience life intensely. You care about injustice. You seek meaning. You appreciate and strive for the exquisite. You are painfully sensitive. You are extremely complex. You cherish integrity. Your truth-telling has gotten you in trouble. Should 98% of the population find you odd, seek the company of those who love you just the way you are. You are not broken. You do not need to be fixed. You are utterly fascinating. Trust yourself!”

Linda Silverman~Gifted Development Center Denver


Saturday 28 June 2014

It's a Canada Day Blog Hop Eh?

Ruby Slippers Blog Designs


Summer vacation officially started for me at 3:30 yesterday!  I was so relieved to finally be done for the year.  A bunch of great canadian bloggers and Teachers Pay Teachers store owners are linking up to kick off the Canada Day long weekend with a FREEBIE fest!  

There are lots of great blogs to check out and freebies to download...to help get you ready for that time of year that shall not be talked about on the first day of summer vacation (BTS).

Here is my FREEBIE.  Just click on the image below to download it from my TpT store.  There are TONS of other great freebies you might want to grab while you are there.


To continue your hop just follow along below.









Sunday 15 June 2014

Father's Day Ideas...you can save them for next year!


I wasn't going to write a post about what we did for Father's day this year...I thought there were probably a LOT of great ideas already going around...and we didn't get it finished until the end of the day on Friday!  BUT...they turned out so well I can't help but show them to you.

A few months ago I was walking around (read: picking up tons of stuff I have no idea what I will do with but I MUST HAVE) at Dollar Tree when I saw some plain wooden frames.  I snatched up a class set of them, knowing I would come up with something to use them for.

Fast forward a few weeks...I keep seeing really cute pictures on Facebook of students with their names on them in fonts.  You have probably seen these pictures too...the kids are standing against a brick wall and they have information superimposed on top of the picture.  I thought to myself "that would be an awesome father's day gift!"  I knew I could have the kids paint the frames and then I would put in a their picture as a gift for their dad.


I had the students enter in all the words they could think of to describe their father into WordArt.  They then chose an image from the list of pre-made images and created their word picture.  

Later in the week, I had the students use craft store acrylic paint to create a custom colour for their frame and we painted them using sponge brushes.  Acrylic paint is great in that it dries really quickly and the students were able to do more than one coat and have it dry in less than an hour.

We added the custom made WordArt word clouds to the custom painted frames and VOILA!











I hadn't intended to wrap the gifts for the students but they did such an amazing job that I went back to another local store (Dollarama) and purchased plain butcher paper gift bags and some red and blue tissue paper.