Book Publishing Mini-Poster

Our students love to publish their own work. We make blank books by stapling together 3-5 pages of paper, plus a front cover. (A back cover is optional if your students want to add comprehension questions, a pretend ISBN number, etc...) We leave these blank books in our writing center. When students are there, or if they finish their work early, they can publish a fiction or nonfiction book of their own. You can provide a list of subject ideas, story starters, or even random clip art to jump-start creativity. When your students complete their stories they will be anxious to share them with the class. Sometimes they are so excited that they’ll forget crucial details such as their name or punctuation. We use this mini poster to prompt our students into creating more refined books.

The poster can hang at your writing center, in various spots around the room, or use our mini-mini sized posters to glue in writing journals for reference. Your students will be proud of their polished final products.

Exploring Polar Bears: A Cross-Curricular Unit

It’s time to meet our polar bears!

We have created a unit for any classroom from kindergarten to second grade. We have graphic organizers, prompts, and paper to enrich your students’ writing. There are a variety of math activities including measurement, estimation, computation, and lots of skip counting! We offer map, menu, and research project ideas to foster creative science and social studies skills. Best of all, we end our unit with a game, a craft, and a snowy snack recipe. Polar bears are currently a threatened species. One of our best defenses against animal extinction is to bring awareness to the students we teach. Our unit can help facilitate productive conversations, as well as provide you with effective activities to build upon basic abilities. Check it out at Teachers Pay Teachers.

Official Scientist Badges

Our students really enjoy science projects. As teachers, we try to create multiple opportunities for conducting experiments in the classroom. After completing whole group instruction or sample experiments, it’s great to follow-up with independent or small group activities. Throughout the year whenever students are making observations, collecting data, suggesting hypotheses, etc., we tell our students that they are scientists. Sometimes to help our students really feel like scientists we give them these badges to wear.

We print these on cardstock and insert them in plastic badge holders (with clips). This allows for extra durability and longevity. They clip the badges on at the start of each experiment and return them to our basket at the conclusion of each experiment. If you are using these at a center or small group, it is fun to add goggles, lab coats and clipboards too! Our students look forward to feeling official and important!

Ideas Sweet Shoppe

Looking for a way to sweeten your writing center? Group empty cookie jars, candy jars, jelly jars or frosting canisters on a table or shelf to look like an old-fashioned candy store. Decorate with paint, permanent markers or ribbons to add a pop of color or designs. Attach labels to the front of each container to show writing topics for various subject areas. Some examples might be Math Munchies, Science Sweets or Language Arts Lollies.

Each container can hold story starters, thought provoking questions, task cards, or creative project ideas from the various topics. The prompts can be made on colorful cards or even wrapped and rolled to look like pieces of candy (for you super creative people)! Responses can be put in journals or on writing paper.

Take time to share the writing after it’s finished and make sure to keep your candy store fully stocked. It might even be fun to pass out a candy treat once in a while.

The Idea Sweet Shoppe is a great place for your early finishers to visit! You can snag your own copy of the sign here.

An Ed Emberley Art Center

Who doesn’t love Ed Emberley books? I used them when I was a little girl and now I use them in my classroom. They build artistic confidence and spread creativity. My favorites have always been the thumbprint books. You start with a basic thumbprint and turn it into something fun like an elephant or spider or lion. If you have a whole page of thumbprints you could make your own zoo!

Erin and I like to make copies of our thumbprint page.

Then we set up an art center for our students. We include Ed Emberley’s books, markers, colored pencils, crayons and clipboards. We display a sample page too.

Sometimes the students copy our ideas, other times they create their own, like a thumbprint Elvis! This is a quick and easy way to encourage students to draw using basic shapes, lines and squiggles.