That's very Pinteresting!

One of my favorite websites/past times is Pinterest. If you are not already on Pinterest, you have to be invited - however, there is a back door. If you go to their website, you can enter in your email, and request an invite. It shouldn't take too long before you have your invite. In fact, if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, you can use one of those to get in. Once you are in, though, its like a disease, you are hooked! You can't escape it. You will find that whenever you are near a computer or other device with Internet, you want to go to Pinterest. (Trust me, I've gotten 2 of my 3 children hooked on it, and my 11 year old keeps asking me for an account, now as well. :)

If you have never heard of Pinterest, or keep wondering what the little red "P" is that you keep seeing on websites, Pinterest is awesome for visual people. Its like taking all of your bookmarks, taking a snapshot of something you find interesting on that page, and organizing them onto bulletin boards, so you can visually see all of your bookmarks. Think of it as digitally tearing a page from a magazine of something you like, then pinning it on your cork board. Now imagine a wall covered in different themed cork boards - one with recipes, another with dream home furniture, another with craft ideas, and so on. Then imagine that you are able to share you cork boards with others, so they can see your recipe ideas, craft ideas, and dreams. That's Pinterest!

Teachers LOVE Pinterest for sharing classroom ideas, and printables for their classroom. Busy Crafters find even more ideas to add to their crafty "to-do" list; and nothing makes you want to try a recipe more than seeing a succulent, mouth watering picture of the food dish! It's great for brides, as well, as it provides a wonderful place to store (and organize) pictures of all the things you like as you are doing your wedding planning. No more dog-earing pages of bridal magazines, then trying to remember which magazine that dress or hair-do was in. Just simply scroll through your boards, and its there!

Be sure to get the "Pin It" tool for your browser. Its a little button your drag to the book marks bar on your browser, then any website you visit, any page you see, any picture you like, you can click on the "Pin It" button in your browser and add it to your pins/boards. You can also copy the URL from the page you are on, and add it as a pin while on Pinterest, or upload a picture. There's even iOS and Android apps you can download, so you are never far from Pinterest. (Although, I don't recommend the Android app. It has security issues.)

A few things to note, when you are using Pinterest, be specific in your descriptions, check the resource, and always give credit where it is due. One of my pet peeves on Pinterest is to see a wonderful picture or great idea of something, then I click on it only to find that I cannot go to the website where the person found it, I get a 404 error, or I have to go to, yet, another website to find the original directions. It only takes a few minutes, but it is so helpful to your followers, to check out the resource and make sure it is a legit site, rather than blindly repin someone else's pin. Also, if the picture is from a blog, help those that follow you, find the picture quickly enough on the blog, by clicking on the title of the article and going directly to that page (rather than the general site root, and having to do a search through the whole blog site for that one "how-to"). This will save them a lot of extra time and frustration. If the page no longer exists (which happens a lot in re-pins), I check around on Google for something like it using keywords from the picture. If I can't find it, I don't post it. If I see a pin that takes me to blog, where I have to another blog to find the directions, I help my followers, by copying the link for the original blog article, repin the picture (so credit is given to the original person I got it from), but then go back and edit the link so the directions are easily found.

Some times there are cases where you are not able to grab a picture from the site you like, but you really want it, so you take a screen shot of it. Upload the screen shot, but then make sure you copy the URL so you can give credit to the site.

Another pet peeve of mine is to see key words repeated in the description over and over. Like, love, love, love - or dress, dress, dress. Really?! I can see it's a dress (or whatever the key word is). Be descriptive. What is it that you like about it? What is it made of? How would you use it, or where would you put it?

As a teacher, I'm bothered by the lack of capitalization or punctuation in the descriptions as well. I realize that a lot of the time, most pinners are pinning from a mobile device and capitalizing is an extra step. But, please, take a few minutes to capitalize! (That just makes me want to take out my red teacher pen, and correct their mistakes in the comments section under their picture.)

Okay, end of lecture. I should probably mention, since I talked about them above, that you can follow people, or rather their boards, on Pinterest. You can follow just one of their boards, or you can follow all of their boards. Then, when you open up Pinterest, you can see the ideas and pictures they have been pinning. You can search or go through tons of different categories, like Art, Photography, Crafts, Education, etc. If you find someone that has a lot of great ideas pinned in one board, you may want to follow just that one board. Or, if its a friend, you may want to follow all of their boards.

One last piece of caution advice, be careful you don't get yourself blocked from pinning. It can easily happen, especially if you are doing a lot of constant repinning or following boards. (And, by following, I mean, that you are actively searching for people or boards to follow, then clicking on the follow button.) If you do find you are blocked from pinning and are not able to pin any more, don't worry. Send them an email, let them know you are blocked, and that you are a real person, and not a bot, and they will remove the block.

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Wall decorations - Part 2

The students are all back to school, now, and the school year is officially in full swing. Things here have started getting back to their usual fast pace and hectic schedule. I had a request to work on some horses for another teacher's room, and finished them just in time for the students to return to school on Monday. Actually, I finished them on Thursday as I was running out the door trying to get my middle schooler, and my high schooler off to their own schools for Open Houses (both, at the same time).

The technique I described in my last blog was easy enough to follow that my friend ended up tracing some of the spots on the palomino I was making for her, and helping to finish the horse. I think after watching me trace two horses out for her this year from clip art I found in Appleworks, she will be able to work on her own bulletin board and wall decorations next year.

I managed to snap a few photos of the cows and pigs I wrote about in my last blog. Unfortunately, it was late in the day and the hallway lights had already been dimmed for the day. But, I think these will show enough detail to get the idea across.



The cows are about 4 to 5 feet in length and take up the majority of the wall in the hallway. Their hooves are starting to curl up from where I colored them black with a marker, instead of using black construction paper or bulletin board paper. This was a lesson learned. When I made the horses, I used scrap pieces of black butcher paper, tracing, cutting, and gluing in place.


The cows and the pigs are separated by a fire door but are on the same wall in the hallway outside the room. One of the aides in the room collects pigs, porcelain pigs, that is, so the idea of the pigs was for her. I found a clip art online of a cute cowboy riding the pig, which lends itself to the Wild West theme we have for our school this year.

Another hint I learned in the process of doing them was to disable to screen saver and sleep mode on the laptops. It can be quite frustrating as the screen suddenly goes black and then have the screen saver dance around on the board as you are trying to trace your animal.

I hope this helps to inspire some that feel they cannot draw or lack creativity. I did both of these wall decorations in a couple of afternoons. The horses were a little smaller and took me just a couple of hours. This also has other applications that can be useful in the classroom with the students, such as character studies in Language arts, and tracing maps of states and countries for social studies. The only limit to creativity with this is your resourcefulness in doing searches for clip art, drawings, and photographs.

New take on an old trick

I was helping a friend decorate her classroom today, or rather, the wall in the hallway outside her classroom, when I was shown a new trick (Thanks, Adriane!). Actually, its not really a new trick, but more of a new take on an old trick. For years teachers have been creating wonderful decorations for their wall or bulletin board by projecting an image on the wall and tracing it. The old way that I remember of doing this, and have used for years, has been to sort through books or coloring books for a picture you like and use an opaque projector, or an overhead projector. If using an overhead projector, you had to make a transparency of the picture you wanted to use. This took some time, not only in the actual creation of the decoration, but also in the prep work. Time was spent rifling through books and copying the image first onto a piece of acetate.

I was sort of expecting my friend to show me a file that had some cute images already copied onto transparency film, or books to use, when she instead opened up her Internet browser and Googled for cow clip art. I thought of printing the image out and using the ELMO (or other document camera), but she told me that wasn't necessary. All we needed to do was to hook the computer (ibook) up to the projector and voila! No printer was necessary! (Why waste more paper, right?)

After doing a "web search" on Google, we then decided to look through AppleWorks clip art instead and found just the cow we were looking for. She was using her laptop at the time, so I opened up AppleWorks on another ibook and found the same image. We made the image to fit a full standard size sheet of paper, hooked up the projector and I was in business. I also did another Google search, this time using the "image search" and found a perfect mate for the other cow. I had a blank page open in AppleWorks in the window right behind my browser window, so I just dragged the image onto my AW document and I was set to create the other cow.

For those that have never done this before, I taped a piece of brown bulletin board paper to the whiteboard which I was using as my drawing surface. It's hard and extremely smooth so it makes for a good tracing surface rather than a bumpy painted wall. I used brown because it was my base color. Once I had the outline of the cow, or bull, traced with a black marker (I chose to use a regular Crayola marker rather than a Sharpie so it didn't bleed through the thin paper and mark up her white board), I taped, or in some cases, held up pieces of other colors for the spots, nose, horns, and eyes and traced the details. Afterwards, I cut out those pieces and glued them in place while I still had the projected image up. (Glue sticks are such a marvelous invention! No mess or wrinkles in the paper. Now if only we can come up with an easier method for cutting these large figures out!)

Tomorrow I'm making pigs for her using the same method, and adding more grass around the cows that I hung in the hallway. I'll have to take some pictures of the completed scene and post them in here.