A Collection of Fonts & Lettering For Almost Anything!

My daughter Brianna and I love creating cool newsletters, flyers, posters, graphics for blog post, letter heads, social media posts...basically about anything tied to graphic design, branding and marketing, we love creating! 

When we work on these things, we like and use a lot of the different fonts that are included in digital tools, apps and presentation tools, but we really like to go to other sites to find fonts and lettering that really makes the things we create stand out and grab the attention of the readers and audience. 

For example, when my teacher librarian partner, Jessica, and I put together the Van Meter Spring Break Smore that we sent out to families and students last week, I wanted to find a font that was fun and really stood out within the newsletter. 

I went to one of my favorite font sites, Font Meme, 3D Fonts, and looked for the perfect one. As you can see, there are a lot of really fun ones to choose from.  

When Brianna and I were working on some Makerspace ideas around gaming in libraries, we went to Textcraft to create these cool Minecraft looking letters for the title of the work. 

And we certainly can't miss another from Font Meme called Graffiti Fonts! We love finding all of these awesome graffiti fonts and being able to change the color too! 

We not only enjoy using these font and lettering sites ourselves, we also love sharing them with others.  My students at Van Meter really enjoy being able to make their projects and presentations extra special and teachers & librarians love being able to make their work stand out even more too. 

To share our favorites and lots more with all of you, we brought them together in a new Collection by Destiny. You can find the Fonts and Lettering Collection here.  

Please feel free to ask to be a collaborator in this Collection or share sites that should be included in this Collection too.  And let us know what other sites you use and we will add them to the Collection too.

Thank you for joining Brianna and I for another post on our blog, Our Voice in Learning.  We love learning alongside all of you. 

The Bus Book Box Is Coming To Van Meter...Here Is What You Need To Bring It To Your Buses & Readers Too!

My dear friend and partner in lots of collaborative and exciting learning, reading and creative fun, Tracy Ferguson, and I have something cooking!  

After we saw this wonderful story shared on Facebook of sharing books with kids to read on bus rides, we decided to see how this would work in our community.  So Tracy asked one of our bus drivers and awesome teachers, Quin Pelz, if we could try it out and after spring break the...

...Van Meter Bus Book Box is coming!  

To prepare for this new reading program, we went to our favorite digital storytelling and marketing tool, Buncee, and created these little signs. 

I asked Buncee to create a bus sticker with transparent windows so we could add Tracy, Quin and I's...

...Bitmoji's for a personal touch.  

These will go on the plastic book totes, that Tracy found for $1.00.  These would be perfect to hold books, bookmarks and a few pencils for them to write their names on the bookmarks.  We are going to see how they work and could possibly use...

...milk crates, that we found online for $10.00. 

We could use a plastic cup and a few zip ties to attach it to the inside or outside to hold bookmarks and pencils too. 

You can find the poster link from Buncee here....Feel free to make changes and use this for your Bus Book Box signage. 

We also created special Van Meter Bus Book Box bookmarks in Buncee.  It is so easy to do with their new bookmark template and we loved using our 2nd graders backgrounds they created. 

Our kids will love using these in the books they read on the bus.  

It will give them a place to write their name and then place the bookmark in the book if they want to pick it back up when they get back onto the bus.

You will find the bookmark design in Buncee at this link.  Again, feel free to use this one to make your own.

We got lots of bookmarks printed at Overnight Prints so they will be ready to go when we get back to school next week. 

By bringing books to our buses through the Van Meter Bus Book Boxes, we are giving our students another wonderful chance to connect to books, reading and to celebrate #VanMeterReads! 

We will keep everyone up to date of how this new reading program goes!  

Have You Seen Where On Google Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? Check It Out Here!

Something very exciting has come to Google Earth that will allow you to take your students on an adventure around the globe through geography clues and more! 

When you look in the right hand corner, you will see a tiny red figure and when you click on it...

...a familiar character will pop up.... Carmen Sandiego! 

As shared in this Mashable article, 

"The Crown Jewels Caper" is a brief but completely endearing throwback in which you talk to locals and use the clues they drop to find Carmen's next location on the map. And because all of this plays out in the Google Earth app, you have a camera zooming around to show you the sights.

The story ties directly to the characters and art style of the Netflix series, though the small handful of cutscenes have more of a pixelated Ye Olde Video Game look. The whole thing doesn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes to play through, though Google's announcement promises "other capers in the near future."

Just to help you better set your expectations: This is a cool, little story but it's not the kind of game you'll play again and again. Where the original Carmen games mixed things up every time with random locations to visit and clues to unravel, The Crown Jewels Caper is a scripted story.

It's still an enjoyable blast of nostalgia and will cost you nothing, so it's worth checking out. You can try it right here on Android, Chrome, and iOS.

To start up this fun new geography game, just click on Let's Go, 

and it will open up into Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego, 

 where you will be guided through an awesome and secretive assignment with Carmen Sandiego.

When I clicked on the little magnifying glass and airplane, it took me to places through prompts that I read and answered,

 and trips around the world.

I even tried it out on Google Earth from my phone and I found the same little Carmen Sandiego character in the left hand corner that when I clicked on...

 ...opened up into the same geography based game as I did online.

I can't wait to have our students at Van Meter play Where On Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego on our iTouches, iPads and their Chromebooks, when we are back from Spring Break.

You can find Where On Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego here too.