We went to a birthday party for Dave's cousin the other day and I made her a card. The cover is very similar to the first one I had made for another birthday party a few weeks ago, but the inside is a little different. I'm still just kind of experimenting with these and hope to get better at them eventually.
Another thing I made recently was for work. I'm working with some students who have been struggling with the concept of place value. Since the idea of having them just write numbers over and over until they get it seemed rather boring, I began researching ideas for games and other things to help with it. I went to proteacher.net and started a discussion on one of the message boards to get ideas. Someone posted an idea that I loved...Place Value Snakes! She sent me this and I thought it was a great idea for something to try. The idea is that the students are each given a snake (well, they make their own, but because I'm only with these kids for a half hour a day, I made them in advance) and some beans or beads or something like that and when the teacher calls out a number, the student puts the correct number of beans/beads/other into the correct slot to represent the number. The students I've been working with are only working on numbers up to 9,999, so mine only has 4 slots. I didn't permanently attach the snake's head on any of them, though, because I plan to eventually add more egg carton slots as the kids begin work on larger numbers.
A very simple thing to make and use, but it changes it up for the kids a little bit and they enjoyed it. =)
