2015 Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-up Weekend in Review

Wow, where do I even begin to review my amazing trip to the beautiful French Lick Resort in French Lick, Indiana for the annual Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-Up? So much anticipation led up to this trip, and I must honestly say, it did not disappoint. Holly Ehle from Mrs. Ehle's Kindergarten Connections and my teaching partner, Brittany Banister from Mrs. Banister's Kindergarten Kids, really put in the hard work and time to not only put together a great opportunity for all of us teacher bloggers from around the country to get together and collaborate, but for us to also receive some great teacher swag! Seriously, just so amazing. I'm excited to share it all with you, and when I am finished, you have an opportunity to win some teacher swag for yourself! So, here it goes...

I met up with my bestie, Jena Hudson from Sew Much Music, and headed to French Lick on Saturday morning for the day and night full of fun. 

A detour and a few scary minutes of driving through flooded waters later, Jena and I finally arrived in French Lick, excited and anxious to see everyone. 

This was only my second time visiting French Lick Resort, but it took my breath away just like it was my first time. The inside of the resort is seriously stunning.

While waiting for the time to enter our designated room for the meet-up, I immediately began running into some of my favorite people in the resort lobby. One of them being by Breaking Bad buddy, Deedee Wills from Mrs. Will's Kindergarten. I first met Deedee when she presented at the Indiana Kindergarten Conference presented by SDE in November, and I was excited to be able to reunite with her. 

Once the doors opened to the meet-up room, I was instantly surrounded by over 100 of the best teacher bloggers around, and a handful of them were all teachers from my district. 

{The room was once again decorated beautifully from pom centerpieces to name tags by the wonderful Schoolgirl Style.}

{Below are all the girls, minus Brittany Banister, who attended the meet-up from Scott County District 2 in Scottsburg, IN where I teach at. I am so proud and blessed to be a part of a district who encourages and supports all of us to grow professionally through blogging about our teaching.}

While at the meet-up, we were able to enjoy lunch and then we introduced ourselves to everyone. I loved being able to put faces and "real" names to blogs that I have followed for a long time. 

Introductions was then followed up by breaking up into grade levels and conducting our "Teacher Tool Gift Exchange." You can read all about it on my previous post by clicking on the picture below of the teacher tools I received during the exchange.

{Pictured above is the four groups we broke into for the exchange. I was obviously in the Kindergarten group on the top right.}

After the exchange, we were able to see what Holly and Brittany had been teasing us about for weeks. We had donations from several companies such as Lakeshore Learning, Scentos, Vera Bradley, Erin Condren, Creative Teaching Press who provided all of us in attendance with some amazing teacher swag. Everyone was seriously so blown away by the generosity of these companies!

{Below is all of the goodies we were presented with, aka: Teacher SWAG!}

{Above are all the goodies we were given from the above companies. We were clearly excited and thankful!}

After we were all blown away by the amazing gifts, we were released for dinner on our own. We hit up Chicago's pizza in French Lick for dinner and returned to our hotel room for a little friendly game of "Heads Up" on our phones and to change into our pjs.

At 8:30, we headed down in full pajamas and slippers to the PJ Party. A huge thanks to both Teachers Pay Teachers and GoNoodle for sponsoring the party. GoNoodle also donated lanyards for each of us teachers. We had so many fun things at the party to keep us busy such as pillow decorating, a photo booth, GoNoodle fun, a "business card" exchange, and lots and lots of food goodies!

{French Lick has the best ice cream, so we needed wanted to grab some before heading to the PJ party.}

{Photobooth station fun with my favorite ladies!}

{Pillowcase decorating station. Photo credit goes to Brittany Banister's Instagram account: MrsBanistersKindergartenKids.}

{GoNoodle station. Who says only our students can love GoNoodle?!}

{As the fun started to die down, many of us gathered together on the floor with our pillows and enjoyed catching up with others.}

My entire reason for this weekend was to be inspired all over again. I'm inspired almost daily by so many of these wonderful educators via their blogs, and I loved the opportunity to collaborate and continue the inspiration face to face. {Each letter is signed by each person at the meet-up.}

After hours of fun, everyone returned to their rooms, and if others did what my roomies and I did, we stayed up for hours continuing to talk until the wee hours of the morning. 

The next morning we all met for breakfast and said our goodbyes before heading home, rejuvenated and inspired about teaching our little ones.

Whew, now that you've got the inside scoop of all the happenings at the Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-Up 2015, now it is your chance to win your own teacher swag!

You can win all of the items below by entering our giveaway below. Also be sure to check out the fun that the other bloggers at the meet-up had!

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An InLinkz Link-up

Five for Friday- {Spring Break & a FREEBIE!}

Can you believe it? This is the third Friday this month that I am linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

This week has been spring break for me, and I have been thoroughly enjoying it! I have been working a lot on my wedding checklist this week since I have had the extra time and have tackled a few crafty projects that I've been putting off. This is just one of my many projects I was able to complete. I was given two chalkboard picture frames by a friend who used it at her rustic wedding. A coat of metallic gold paint, some mod podge, gold glitter, and chalkboard spray paint later, and voila! Isn't it a beaut? I'm undecided on what I will write on both of them, but I'm super excited just the same!

This was posted on the Teachers Pay Teachers Instagram account this week, and I found it completely worth sharing, just in case you hadn't seen it yet. This quote epitomizes my reasoning for joining the teacher blogging world and why I look forward to the Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-Up every year. I love surrounding myself with the best of the best, and I can honestly say that I have several wonderful educators in my district that I am surrounded by, and I am obviously surrounded by outstanding educators in the blogging world. 

Tomorrow kicks off our Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-Up Weekend in Review blog posts. Everyone who attended this year's meet-up has been anxiously waiting to share all the details of the fun weekend with all of our blog followers, and we finally will be letting you in on everything tomorrow! Come back to my blog tomorrow to see how I spent my time at the meet-up, and see how much fun other bloggers got into as well!

Next week when I return to school, we will be celebrating Easter all week long. We will be using literacy and math centers from my Easter Literacy & Math Pack, and completing several craftivities.

One of the craftivities we will be completing is my Easter Bunny Writing Craftivity. You can grab this craftivity for yourself and your class right now by clicking on the picture below. Enjoy this FREEBIE, and have a great week. :) 

P.S. Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for more Easter activities and three more Easter FREEBIES!

2015 Teacher Tool Gift Exchange

Last Saturday I attended the 2nd Annual Spring Teacher Blogger Meet-Up at the beautiful French Lick Resort in French Lick, Indiana with over 100 of some of the best teacher bloggers out there, and I must say if it is even possible, it was even better than last year's meet-up. Seriously, it was AMAZING! Next week all of us teacher bloggers who attended the meet-up this year will be letting you all in on all the fun we had last weekend, but this weekend we are going to share one very special, and exciting, part of the meet-up... the teacher tool gift exchange! {A big thanks to Miss DeCarbo for hosting the teacher tool gift exchange linky!}

This teacher tool exchange goes like this:

Each blogger is encouraged to put together a gift of their favorite teaching tools and to bring it with them to the meet-up. This year we had so many bloggers attend the meet-up, we broke up into grade levels to exchange our gifts. The wonderful Amanda Pauley from Mrs. Pauley's Kindergarten read a teacher right/left story she wrote. In this story, every time that Amanda said the word left, everyone passed the gift in their hand one person to the left, and then every time she said right, we passed the gift in our hand to the right. At the end of the story, whichever gift is in your hand is the one you got to keep! We then sat down and went around and opened our gifts for everyone to see, and we got to hear from the person our gift came from about why the items were their favorite teacher tool.

{Above is the group of Kinder teachers in our group for the gift exchange.}

{Above is all four groups we split into by grade level for the exchange.}

My gift this year for the exchange was a combination of several things I cannot live without. I, of course, forgot to take a picture of my items before exchanging them; however, I did take this picture to post on my Instagram prior to the meet-up of my wrapped teacher tool gift...and Max, who loves the camera, had to get in the picture. 

I wrapped up several pads of sticky notes because the organizer in me labels just about everything in my classroom. I also can be very forgetful, I'll blame it on the fact that my mind is working on several things all the time all at once, so sticky notes are my saving grace to making sure I do things I need to remember to do. I have learning that if it doesn't make its way onto a sticky note, it might not happen. So, gifting pads of them just made sense. 

I also gifted a pack of Papermate Flair pens. Along with my labeling obsession, I like to color coordinate when I label, and my favorite way to do that is with flair pens. 

The final thing I added to my gift was a $5 Starbucks gift card. Unfortunately there isn't a Starbucks in my town; however, if there was, I would be getting a hot chocolate every morning to make it through my day. (Hot chocolate because I have not acquired the taste for coffee...yet. I'm working on it.)

I can't for the life of me remember who received my gift, but I hope they are enjoying it and finding the items useful. 

Now, onto the gift I received...

My gift came from Crystal over at Kreative in Kinder.

I received all of the goodies above: pencil pouch full of colorful gel pens, two packs of sticky notes (yay!), a small notebook, colorful duct tape, and a Glade air freshener. 

I have already explained why I would be so excited about the sticky notes and colorful pens, but what you also may not know is that I keep a small notebook next to my bed in case I come up with any teaching, blogging, or TPT ideas at night because, if I'm honest, some of my best thoughts come to me when I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep. My brain rarely shuts off. I am excited to have another notebook I can use when my first one gets filled up!

I use duct tape all the time in my classroom. More specifically, I use it to label a spot on the carpet where particular students need to sit during our morning meeting or read aloud time. Right now, in particular, I am using duct tape to put spots on the floor during our class play rehearsal time to show students where they need to stand during the play so that everyone can be seen and heard. I recently ran out of duct tape, and I was still needing some for the first week of April when we perform the play in the cafeteria for our school and our parents. Now I have some!

I also got pretty excited about the Glade air freshener because I am lucky enough to have both a boys' and a girls' bathroom in my classroom, and let's just say, they don't always smell the greatest. Every time I spray my room with air freshener, I pay special attention to both of those bathrooms. I am now able to open the air freshener and not worry about those less than pleasing smells from the bathroom. 

Now, head over to the other blogger's blogs who attended the meet-up, and find out what teacher tool they received during the exchange. You might just get a great idea for your own classroom!

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