Lack of Motivation and Throwback Thursday

I have had some serious bloggy writer's block this week people!  I have all these ideas swirling around in my head and I can't seem to get any of them out onto the blog. I will be better next week...I swear.

In the meantime, luckily for me, The First Grade Parade has a great linky all about a throwback! This is my first time linking up with

I am choosing this oldie-but-goodie because so many people have re-pinned it! Here's the post behind my portable thesaurus!

****Originally posted July 25, 2012****

Whew! Today was a long day…I worked in my classroom allllll day! I am so excited to be getting things ready to go. In a couple of days, I will start posting pictures of my room. Yay!

But today, I thought I would share something that I did last year that was easy and turned out to be something very useful.

We all have premade charts (I think) that kids may or may not ever refer to during the day. Plus, in this era of anchor charts, premade posters seems to be losing out to charts made with the class.

So, I saw this poster from Teacher Created Resources at my local teacher store before school started last year. I loved the idea of other ways to say those “tired” words. And I bought it with every intention of putting it up on the wall.

Click the picture or link to buy this chart!

But, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted something more user-friendly for the kids. And here’s what I did:

I cut the poster apart into individual sections. I laminated each section and punched a small hole in the corner.

I took a metal ring and ran it through all the cards, and used a hook to hang it on my writing bulletin board! I even cut off the title and hung it above the ring. (I forgot a pic here, but I will take one when I go to school tomorrow and update the post.)

It turned into the most used “thesaurus” in the room! Kids used the heck out of these little guys…they took them off the rings and shared them around and often had other kids looking around to find them. (NOTE: the metal ring did not hold up as well as I would have liked, but they managed to get it back together with plenty – and I mean PLENTY – of Scotch tape.)

Since I did this, I have looked for other ways to use premade charts. Do you have any ideas like this? I would love to hear them!

Have a great day everyone! Thanks for visiting!

Hope you all enjoyed this throwback! If you've made it this far, you should click the button below to take you to a fantastic giveaway at Learning with Mrs. Leeby - so many awesome prizes!