the Doctor Who 12 Pains of Christmas by Holley Drye

The Doctor's 12 Pains of Christmas from Holley Drye on Vimeo.

I can't take credit for this. I just had to post it here to try to get it in Pinterest

more stuff for pinterest

Here are some random photos, most of which were stolen from Craig on Facebook. Well, the Doctor Who ones anyway.

This first one is an autumn sunrise over Big Lake, Washington. 

Next two are from the Japanese maple in my front yard. 

Sometimes I wish signs like this really existed.

And now the Doctor Who pictures...

Yeah, someday, I just may have some followers and they will know I'm more than a bit crazy.

Random stuff I want to put up on Pinterest

Yes, Pinterest is the real reason I started this blog. I had so many pictures of my own that I wanted to post and I still haven't figured out how to do that from Facebook.

So here are some seemingly random photos, most of which are Doctor Who.

I'll post more school stuff later. Right now, I need to get this up on Pinterest then run off to celebrate my 54th birthday on 11/11/11. That date is SOOO cool!

I should be more careful what I write here because someday I may actually have some followers.

School Auction quilts

Here are the quilts I made for our school auction for the last two years. For both quilts, the students each designed a square after viewing the fabrics. My only restriction was that there were limited repeats in the color combinations in the blocks.

In this quilt from the 2009 - 2010 school year, the fabrics are all fruit and vegetable themed. On this one, the students also had to decide on the placement of each of the 6 fabrics around the outside of the square. This made layout extremely difficult since I was determined that no two squares would touch on identical fabric and that similarly colored stars would also be separated.

The quilt for the 2010 - 2011 school year featured fabrics from the Eric Carle collection. Eric Carle is a children's book author and illustrator. His most notable book, in my opinion, is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The pictures in his books are all made up of collages of brightly painted paper most having a finger painted look.

The collection lacked a mostly yellow fabric that I needed to fill out my pallet. I chose a Moda Marbles yellow but it is the only fabric in the quilt that is not Eric Carle.

The design for this quilt is a nine patch alternating with half-square-triangle blocks. As the students began designing their choice of one dark color and one light color blocks, I realized how close we would be to having two of each possible color combinations in the quilt. At that point, I decided to go for it even though it would make it larger than I had originally planned. This also made it the biggest quilt I have ever made for the school auction.

Here's a photo showing the class with the quilt which gives a better idea of the size. I was pleased that the final bid on this quilt at the auction was $1450! That's the most any of my quilts have ever earned for the school.

For this year's school auction in March, I already decided to make a pinwheel quilt that I've made twice before - once for a school raffle MANY years ago and the second as a gift for a young friend.

Pattern Necklaces

I've made necklaces with first graders before using faceted beads and elastic 'thread'. I knew Kindergarteners would not be able to handle this since some of the first graders had trouble with it. So for the Ks, I bought lanyard and pony beads. I taped the lanyard to their desks and had them put a handful of two different colors of beads on a bowl. They then made AB patterns with the beads.

 The only problem we ran into was that when they were done, they would pull the tape off and forget to hold onto the end that had been taped to the desk. I few of them needed to start over. 

These went home the evening of Open House. I was proud of the students when they were able to explain to their parents what the pattern on their necklace was and what the A and B represented.

and now some Kindergarten content

We've been working on identifying shapes and had done a small book titled Shape Monster, Shape Monster. The students wanted to turn the shapes in their little books into monsters so we decided to make big ones instead.

I cut out all the shapes. I found a die cutter at the JoAnn's for the little squares and circles. It saved a great deal of time. The students had free reign to construct their monsters as they wanted. I was delighted to see the variety and creativity employed and their pride in the finished product.

All the monsters can be viewed here.

http://www.photoshop.com/users/misstougher/albums/1b0af5ce36ba4a6eae89ae15aa4c2a11/slideshow

photos

Okay, giving this a try. I want to add some photos.

Ooh, Mel thinks he's scary! He's not. Well, Riley may think so.

Riley up at the cabin.

That was trickier than I thought it should be but I think I have it figured out now.

Blogging seems to be the thing to do now so I thought I'd give it a shot. I've seen so many wonderful activities from other Kindergarten teachers and thought I might share my own as well as some of the other things I do with my life. Pinterest is where I've seen most of the blogs I've been visiting and linked many wonderful ideas from there.