Bubbling With Excitement

Can I please tell you how excited I am after today? Good! Because I'm going to anyways!

So many wonderful things today! First off, I got to meet and talk to both of my mentor teachers (the third-grade general ed teacher and the special-education teacher) in person and get to know more about them as well as telling them a little about myself. At the high school staff meeting I met times of new faces and was warmly welcomed into the Cascade family and to the third grade team. I can already tell I'm really going to get along with many of these teachers.

In addition to meeting many new faces, I also got to see my classroom for the first time! Guess what? I have my own desk! Not just something small in the corner, I have a full-fledged teacher desk and storage bins even. I know from the experiences of others that this is quite a privilege. So of course this means I need to go shopping for things to place on my desk and organize myself.

There are so many options; I am not sure where to start. I know that I will likely discover some of my own tricks and methods as the school year gets going but I am interested to see what others find useful. I would really like to avoid having a black hole sort of desk where papers go to die.

Here is my question:
What are your "must-have" items for your desk? The items that make your desk a cute, organized, and useful space?

The other fun thing I accomplished today was a little DIY first day of school gift for my students. I really wanted to avoid using food or candy because I'm a fan on non-edible rewards and gifts for. Of course Pinterest never fails and I came across an adorable back-to-school bubbles gift. 

Lucky for me, I had a number of tiny bottles of bubble solution leftover from our wedding. (I knew I had a reason for insisting that we keep them!) So last night I whipped up this little image and today printed them out and secured them to the bottle with double sides tape. Simple as that. 

If you would like to use the image I created, you can get it here for free. It's the perfect size so that it's small enough to fit on the bottle and large enough to easily read. There are 26 per sheet.

Before I go, don't forget to check out my post from Sunday and enter the giveaway for a set of graphics I created! The numbers are pretty small so if you enter now your chances are pretty good!