The Florida bloggers had a great time welcoming everyone to Florida to kick off the 2016 TpT Conference! We want to thank everyone for coming out and joining us as well as our amazing sponsors and donors!! Mary, from Full of Smiles Photography , did a fantastic job of capturing the event! First, we must thank Adam, Amy, and Paul for coming to our event!! Don't they look great?! A huge thank you goes out to Sarah from  Educlips  for making this amazing clip art! But for real...  Thank you to Team TpT for coming out to the event!! It was so awesome for them to come and help us welcome everyone to Florida! BIG thanks to Tabitha Carro from Smartphone Marketing for all her support and fun giveaways throughout the event! Another huge thanks goes out to A+ Images for sponsoring our event and giving away a class set of shirts! We hope everyone enjoyed all the great stuff they found in their swag bags! These were packed with...

The first week of school is exciting, nerve wracking, terrifying, overwhelming, thrilling, and more. And that is just for the teacher! Between learning names, teaching procedures, drying eyes, and assuring the students they will be alright; teacher need to start teaching. There are so many wonderful books for the first week of school, but these are two of my favorite:             Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten             Oliver and His Alligator Let's start with Miss Bindergarten. I love all the activity in this book. It is a great way to start teaching how to use the illustrations to tell the story. This books features rhyming words while teaching the alphabet. Each student in the class has a name that starts with a different letter of the alphabet. The students are named using a rhyming couplet. It is on the next two pages that the illustrations take over. Each two page spread features Miss Bindergarten setting up her classroom. The text is the same each ti...

Time to make the donuts? Wait, wrong commercial. It is, however, time to restore the devises.  My current count is 1 iPad for teacher use, it may be an iPad 2, with a cracked screen, but it still updates to the current iOS and works perfectly. The OtterBox case has kept the screen from getting worse, and it isn't noticeable during use. I run Splashtop on the iPad. This allows me to access my desktop from anywhere in the room. No more running to change the ActivInspire center, I can do it from my small group table.  I have 7 old iDevices, some are old phones and some are old iPods. Only one will update to the current iOS, but I have found that most apps will run on iOS6 or iOS7. There were 8 devices, sadly the battery on one of the phones gave up this year. The ability to control access to one app makes the Apple devices great for center time. I bought 2 Kindles last year when they were on sale. I don't mind the ads on the lock screen, the kids open the device so qu...