No Sew Curtains, Class Brochure, and Work Display {Monday Made It}

This post has been a long time coming! I wanted to back up a show you three very last minute projects I put together the weekend before school started.

I'm linking up with Tara over at Fourth Grade Frolics for her fabulous Monday Made It linky.

The weekend before school started I decided I need to jazz up the curtains in my room. Not the best idea, let me just tell you! BUT I am really happy with the end result! 

The pennant banner on the left came from my old classroom and I felt like it didn't quite fit in on these smaller windows, so I needed a change. 

I love how this has almost a stained glass look at certain times in the day. It really boosted the color in my room. 

So how did I do it? 

I cut strips of fabric 2.5" wide and 21" long and just tied them onto a tension rod. My windows are about 50" and I have 39 strips of fabric on each one, just to give you a little idea. 

It was a quick and easy project that really made a big impact on the look of my room. 

I made brochures for parents to pick up at Open House. 

My next project was super easy and inspired by this pin. 

It's hard to see it in these pictures, but the yard sticks are spray painted purple to match my rock chair and the clothes pins are black. This is going to make displaying student work so easy! 

How do you display student work? 

Cardinal and Intermediate Directions Review

In 4th grade I do a review of cardinal and intermediate directions at the beginning of the year and we are usually set for the rest of the year. This year...not so much. I felt like my students were really struggling with test questions that required them to apply their knowledge of directions. 

I created a few quick and easy activities to use with my students in review stations this week and thought I'd share them with you. These activities were for a station that is teacher-led.

First off I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut out some simple shapes that we used to create our own compasses. We used our creations in the other activities.

Next, I put some copies of these simple worksheets in page protectors and we used the dry erase markers with them. Instead of using the directions at the bottom of the page we all took turns coming up with directions to move around the maps. 

After that we got out the big Virginia maps and started practicing some of those test questions we have such a hard time with. Things like, "If Rachel traveled South from Richmond which state would she come to first?" To spice it up a little we moved dinosaurs around our map. It was something different and I was surprised at how much the kids liked it! I even had them talking to their dinosaur and taking it on a "walking tour" of Virginia's regions. LOL It was really fun! 

I also recently learned a new trick for keeping East and West straight. We wrote the word "WE" in big letters on the map and used that as a visual for helping to remember which side was which. I think its a pretty helpful trick! 

Do you have any tricks for teaching directions?