Helpful Blogger Network!

Yay! I just joined the Helpful Blogger Network! That means you get to ask me whatever questions you like. I can be pretty useful in the Technology and Blogging areas. :)

Here are the rules one must follow in order to link up with Fifth in the Middle:

• You agree to do your best to answer questions posed to you on your blog in a reasonable amount of time.
• If you cannot answer the question, you will still reply to the person asking the question.
• Add the button to your blog's sidebar.
• If you have another area of expertise on which you would be willing to field questions, state that in the Name field, ie. technology, TpT, behavior management, etc. 

You can go here to read more about the network and see if anyone else might be able to answer your questions. Enjoy and ask away. :)

Back to School Sales

YAY!!! I LOVE this time of year. Maybe it is my love for teachers or my love for couponing but I love shopping for school supplies. This year, the sales have already begun! I will try to keep you up to date on some of the really awesome sales but if I can't keep up (which is likely to happen), I wanted to talk about my FAVORITE couponing and deal site, Hip2Save.com! I have been following this site for several years and I am SO thankful to have found it. Collin over at Hip2Save posted a school supply shopping guide last year. This guide shows the lowest price you can expect to pay for certain items. I know that teachers are often spending a ton of their own money to improve their classrooms, so I hope this information will help you stretch your dollar just a little further. Remember most of the office stores have special 25 item limits and other rewards just for teachers.

Have you started school supply shopping yet? What great deals do you hope to score? Let me know in the comments and I will keep my eyes peeled.

New Use for Old Alphie Cards

I am linking up with The Teaching Tribune for their Throwback Thursday post. This was originally posted on my other not successful blog in Nov. of 2013. Somehow our Alphie started working again after that post. :)

A few years ago we bought our daughter an Alphie because it was on sale and she loved robots. We did not expect her to use it for learning right away because she was only about 2 when she received it. From then until recently Alphie has been abused. He has been dropped, slobbered on, and thrown. His speech became garbled and eventually he could no longer talk. Unfortunately, even after multiple trips to the "hospital" he didn't make it. Me, being the great deal shopper that I am had already picked up 3 sets of cards to go with Alphie. After his demise I began to think about how I could use those cards that I already purchased. Here is what I came up with.

I decided to take some of the cards and cut them up. Now we can use these Alphie cards for our own little learning games. These Alphie Booster pack include all sorts of fun things to do. There are matching cards, numbers, letter sounds, colors, rhyming words, and even musical instruments.