The Reddish-Brown Crayon: October 2014

Friday, October 3, 2014

Boo! It's a Tricks & Treats Blog Hop!

Woohoo! I'm back for a fun Blog-Hop that is tied into my favorite holiday!! I love, love, love Halloween! Not because it's dark and spooky but more for the creative side of it! Decorating, costumes, treats, tricks! Creativity is my drug of choice for sure.

So I'm joining forces with Jessica from Mrs. Plemon's Kindergarten for this fun blog hop with lots of tricks and treats for you.

So let's start with a TRICK! I borrowed this amazing idea from one of my colleagues a few years ago. I like to incorporate quick word work actives but always hated taking up a whole notebook for our quick lists and word building activities. She used to carry around a STENO PAD to keep track of her to-do lists and such. It was brilliant! What a great way to always have a quick reference to what to do and make a quick note of what you need to do. If you are anything like me, then you think of something great or important and by the time you are near a pen and paper, you've forgotten what idea it was. Hopefully this problem is not a sign of old-age to come.

This is my STENO for this year so far. Each year I seek out the cutest one I can find and so begins my endless to-do list. Below you can see how used and worn they get by the end of the year. What is neat, is that I hold on to them for a bit and can find some of my ideas from years past.

Back on topic…so then I realized that this incredible friend of mine was also using STENO pads with her kiddos. And they LOVED it! Something about the cute little sized notebook makes them go crazy. So you can do whatever you like but this is how we use them:

And now for the TREAT! I have had this idea for a few years and just never got around to creating it so that I wasn't still using that old-school cut & paste copy I have in my folder. So enjoy this freebie by clicking the picture or HERE and I hope you can spend some fun times begin spookily creative with your kiddos.

Thanks for stopping by. And just to join in, I've decided to throw a weekend sale to go with our Tricks & Treats Blog Hop. Stop by my store HERE and get some deals.