And I'm back!

It sure has been a while.  Actually, my Timehop app on my phone informed me that it was a year ago last week when I bit the bullet and started this lovely blog here, and now so here we are...

Let's all excuse my almost year-long hiatus and chalk it up to a crazy hard school year filled with ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and victories large and small.  And now it's ended....I'm mostly rejuvenated, and although I did go totally crazy and start graduate school, I think I'm doing alright!

Rather than go back and recap everything from the last 11 months, let's jump in to the thing that inspired me to post this morning at all:

My awesome new bulletin board.

I've been toying with the idea of teaching a Harry Potter book for some time now, and I actually tried ending the school year with the first one (The Sorcerer's Stone) which admittedly is not my favorite of the series.  It starts a little slow (and why shouldn't it? Rowling is creating an entirely new world for us and introducing us to a million awesome characters - it should be a little uneventful in those first few chapters!), and it was hard to get the 6th graders swooped up in the excitement of it all.  Needless to say, I felt a little bummed that maybe I'd never be able to teach a HP novel - because if you don't start with the first book, how to do read the second or third without being totally lost??!

Enter grad school, the hero of this short story.  As a final project for my first class, I had to write a short project that would teach character values in my classroom.  I decided to take the approach of teaching about heroes - in real life and fiction - and have them apply that to their own lives.  And that's when it hit me: not only should my entire Reading curriculum be based on heroes in history and literature, but as an ending to this unit and a beginning to my first novel we could watch the first Harry Potter movie and analyze the characters to see who is a hero and who is not....and by watching the movie, we could easily read the 2nd book as our novel study!!!

And that's how this idea was born.

So now, after a short discussion about heroes (and a reprise of the super hero project I did last year!), we will be delving into the magical world of Hogwarts.  And if we're doing that, we need an awesome bulletin board to set the tone, right? 

At first I thought it'd be kind of funny to use the first movie poster and paste my own head on top of Harry Potter's...but seeing as I want the kids to take this seriously, that seemed counter productive.  But I do make a pretty good Harry, don't you think?

Anyway, I went with Option 2: Hogwarts.  Thinking I'd take the easy way out and buy a party backdrop, but I couldn't find any online! I guess the HP craze is dwindling out some?  (SAD!)  So I found this poster from the last movie and decided to base my idea off of that:

Of course, I didn't need my Hogwarts to be on fire, so I used some other pictures to help me create an in-tact Hogwarts.  my poster started like this:

 Nothing to write home about, right?  I just needed a basic silhouette of the castle.  Initially I thought I'd put it on black poster board, but thankfully my kids refused to go to Dollar General with me that day, so I was forced to use the white board I had here...and let them finger paint it.  It actually turned out pretty great!  We used blue, purple, and black, and it kept them busy for at least 10 minutes, so that's a win for me.  I added to the fun by having them paint some paper I could use for mountains: mom and teacher win.

 Next step, put the castle on the background and apply the mountainy paper and letters that I cut out (by hand, mind you!) from my printer.  If only I'd downloaded that snazzy cut everything program for my Cricut before the Provo company got all uppity and banned it....alas, I didn't and thus had to put in some extra man hours.  but they look pretty good, and the jaggedy edges might make them look more Potterish than smooth ones would have.  (That's what I'm telling myself at least!)

 Turned out the mountains were tooo bright, so a coat of black helped that, and I added the tag line, "The Magic Starts Here" to get the kids excited.  And let's face it, my classroom is pretty magical.  I'm like Professor McGonnagal only shorter.  And without the ability to turn into a cat.  (Or can I???)

I did cut the white letters with my Cricut, even though it meant I couldn't use the cool Lumos font I downloaded.  This worked out WAY better.  And then came the stressful part...adding the shading.  I used crayon and added a few things here and there....and happily when it was all over, I managed not to screw it up!  Now I just have to laminate it.....which I'm super nervous about because I ALWAYS mess things up with I laminate them.  That's a class all teachers need in college: Laminating 101.  Some day when I'm a college prof, that will be part of my curriculum.

So there she is, one more time, in all her glory:

I'm going to use the same poster every year and hang it on my door.  Next in the series is the bulletin board for when I'm teaching Bomb by Steve Sheinkin.  The tag line?  "Mrs. Yeagle's Class is the BOMB" with a little mushroom cloud.  I can't wait.