School has officially begun in our house! I can't believe I have a 1st Grader and a Preschooler! Time goes way WAY too fast!!! I feel like our summer break just started, and yet here we are...

Because the first day is always a day worth celebrating, we started it off right with a fun breakfast. Sam picked pancakes with strawberries + whipped cream -- can't argue with that!

Caleb was still asleep or else he would've been in the photo, too.

It's been a fun day in our house. The rest of our 2017-2018 curriculum arrived! I don't know about you, but I'm one of those nerds that gets excited about Back To school deals and getting all the new fun supplies. The day our curriculum arrives is just as exciting, ha!

Do you shop at ALDI? Here in California, we've only had them for about a year now. I was super excited when they announced that they were coming, as I used to love shopping there when we were stationed in Germany years ago. I absolutely love their prices and sales! Typically, the quality is great, too. They also have a section called ALDI Finds that rocks! Sometimes, you can find some killer deals!


While stopping by earlier tonight (I feel like we live there with as much as my boys eat!), I decided to check out their ALDI Finds section. I wanted to see if anything was marked down and low and behold, we found this awesome magnetic memo board! I always see people ask on forums about creative ways of using the All About Reading and All About Spelling magnetic letter tiles and this is perfect! To be honest, we didn't end up using our letter tiles all that much last year. We have a huge IKEA magnetic dry erase board (like this), so it was just too much of a hassle to pull it out just for the lesson. I suppose that sounds lazy, ha. Either way, the AAR magnetic letter tiles will definitely get some use this fall now that we have this handheld board. With that said, I realize we could've bought something similar long ago, but I always dismissed the idea since we had a board, albeit huge. However, for $3, it's a no-brainer! As you can tell by the low res cell phone picture above, my soon-to-be 1st grader is thrilled, ha!