Ideas for bag closures:
Velcro
Zipper
Drawstring
Pillow Sham
Dutch Closure
Slap Bracelet
Handles
Elastic

Flap:
Snap
Weight
Attached sides
Button
Hook
Tie
Belt
Magnet
Hook and Eye
Brad

 My newest pet projects!

List of Books to Read

Book Thief
Moon over Manifest
The Maze
Trouble with Stars
Lovely Bones
Plain Truth
James Patterson
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Inkspell
Percy Jackson

Summer Reading List

Ironman--Chris Crutcher
Bridge to Tarabithia
How to Eat Fried Worms
Series of Unfortunate Events
Wizard of Oz
Indian in the Cupboard
Alice in Wonderland
Cinder--Marissa Meyer
Pathfinder--Orson Scott Card
Samurai Girl--Carrie Asai
Prom; Twisted; Chains; Speak--Laurie Halse Anderson
Tyler on Primetime--Steven Atinsky
The Game of Sunken Places--M. T. Anderson

I've been on a bit of a bulletin board kick after our art class.  These are some ideas that I've used in my "lessons."

Actually this is one that is at the Montessori pre-school.  I think it is a great idea and would be pretty easy to replicate.

I used this to help students learn the letters.  In a classroom I would have a lot more pictures so that there would be several examples of each letter.  The students would then be able to create a "dictionary" with at least one example of each phoneme.

This is a flannel board presentation of the song "Old MacDonald Had a Farm."

This is also be a flannel board of the song "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly."

This was very exciting for me to create.  It is a bulletin to be used with the song "And the Green Grass Grows All Around."  As the class learned the song we would add the pieces that correspond with each verse.

Paper Lei

This was simple and very fun for young children.  We cut out many flowers from colored construction paper and then threaded them onto a colored string, interspersed with short colored straws.  My favorite flowers were the ones that we painted ourselves with our water colors.

Learning about the Hawaiian Lei Day was a great incorporation of culture and historical education.  Perhaps many different cultural activities could be studies beside Hawaiian. This could also be used in science as a way to review the different kinds of flower pedals.

3-D town

This was a very simple project to explain.  Everyone was supposed to use either the cool colors or the warm colors and create a scene or town.  We were then instructed on how to make spirals, stairs, and tunnels and given free rein to employ them in any way we could think of.  I had the idea of creating a "main street".  Starting on the far side of the picture is the "Welcome to The Town of Dreams" sign and arched entrance.  The orange twist on the ground is the street and the origami shapes on each side were my "houses."  Each house has an unusual way to climb the "stairs" to the front door.  The easiest to see in this picture is the fish with a spiral stairway and the boat has a fireman's pole to gain entrance.

The teachers of this project read "Oh the Places You Will Go" by Dr. Seuss to the class and encouraged great creativity in our projects.  With an older group you could study the physics of roller-coasters and the students could create amusement parks.  As I did you could learn origami and focus on the history of this paper art.  The students could be encouraged to each find their own book to make a scene from as a literature project.