I heart Target!

I love school supplies. No, really, I LOVE school supplies. I love thinking about what I can do with unusual items. I love the challenge and excitement of finding a good sale and feeling like I've saved money. I am a thrift store junkie and a Dollar Tree Diva! But, after hearing about all the wonderful goodies that teachers have been finding in the Dollar Spot at Target lately, I had to go and check them out myself. And oh my good gravy, did I find some goodies!

Take a look at these management tools – couldn't pass these up! I have somewhat of a pointer addiction. I only bought one this time, but was really tempted to buy more. Besides this pencil pointer, they also had star pointers in blue and red.

As I prepare to move from Kindergarten to 1^st grade, I am trying to beef up my collection of addition and subtraction materials. I found these fabulous cards that can be used for games or quick transition activities. There was an addition, subtraction, telling time and "quick addition" set. I thought the quick addition set would be great to begin the addition talk with and later for those that still need additional support.

Also, in the math area, I found this Math Bingo game. I was hesitant to buy it, because it said it was addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. And, I know my firsties will only be using addition and subtraction. When I got home and opened it up, I was very excited to see that the cards made the game easily adaptable to any of those skills! They provided 1 set of calling cards for addition, 1 set for subtraction, 1 set for multiplication and 1 set for division! Also, if you really wanted to open it up further, you could make your own set of calling cards using tens & ones! Talk about differentiation. Amazing!

In the literacy area, I found some wonderful things as well. They had dry erase sentence strips – 4 to a pack, leveled readers and these fantastic Dr. Seuss buttons – not sure if you can read them in the picture, but they say Thing 1 and Thing 2 and One Fish, Two Fish. I bought the books in sets of twos and thought they would be great for buddy reading with the "buddies" wearing the Thing 1 and Thing 2 buttons! The sentence strips have endless possibilities, but I will probably use mine in guided reading.

These are cards for beginning blends and diagraphs as well as a pack with traffic signs! How fun is that for environmental print! They also had these cute little books called "Fun Facts". I chose the book about dogs, but they had them about Dinosaurs, Insects and Ocean Animals. These would be great in your science center!

Our district just conducted a Writer's Workshop professional development and I learned so much! I have always had some apprehension about teaching Writer's Workshop, because I felt like I just didn't know enough about the process or the schedule. Now that I have some strategies under my belt, I feel much more excited about it and I am ready to implement it in August! In the meantime, here are some goodies to think about…

They had "Animal Sounds" cards that show a picture of an animal and give the sounds that it makes! How fun would this be when you are teaching about using words that make sound? Also, in this area, I found cards called "Busy People" – there are 36 two sided cards that give a picture, name and description of a job that people do. These little cards have so much potential! I can see kids picking out a job to write about or to be able to write about what they'd like to do someday. Last is a cute little purple stamp pad that would be great in the writing center for students to stamp out sight words or word families, etc.

So, if you are in the market for some new supplies, check out the Target Dollar Spot and see what goodies you can find. If you haven't already done so, head over to Ladybugs Teacher Files to check out her Teacher Shopping Linky Party. There are some great ideas there as well!

Enjoy –

Kelie