Alphabet Snack Sorting

Last year I taught summer school for the first time and was looking for a fun, meaningful, and delicious way to wrap up the last day with my soon to be kindergarteners. I began searching Pinterest for snack ideas because, let’s face it, everything is just more fun with food. After a few minutes of coming up empty handed I saw a picture of a snack mix that included Alpha-Bits cereal and it hit me- An alphabet sort using tasty treats!

I immediately began to think of every snack I’ve ever given my son that had letters on them. I created my shopping list and off I went. After searching through eight different stores I had to give up on the idea of Apha-Bits, but still had a good mix of salty and sweet. Here’s what I included in my snack mix:
Mini Alphabet Pretzels (from Wegmans)
Alphabet Cookies (from The Dollar Tree)
Scrabble Cheez-Its
Mini M&Ms (sorted as the letter M)
Cheerios (sorted as the letter O)

I made charts on 17x11 paper and had students get a few spoonfuls of each ingredient in our snack mix. Then they went back to their seat and sorted. I had a few who needed a bit of extra support, but most were able to match the letters to their mat independently. They had so much fun I’m planning to do this activity again with my first graders at the beginning of the year!

Happy Snacking!

Erin

Beginning the Year with Cy Makes a Friend

Can you believe it’s Back to School time already? Our summers flew by but don’t they always? Erin and I have been thinking about ideas to use in our classroom, especially for the first few weeks of school. We try to create activities based on books with universal themes like sharing, friendship, or kindness. Some of our favorites include Chrysanthemum, Berenstain Bears and the Trouble with Friends, and First Grade Dropout. We incorporate ways for our students to interact with the book from as many angles as possible. My book, Cy Makes a Friend, came out in March. Our students really related to the whole friendship theme and the obstacles we sometimes face when trying to make a friend.

Since then, Erin and I have been working on an activity packet that allows our students to go a little deeper into the story while also having fun! My amazing illustrator, Tracy Subisak, added some color pages. We want to share it with you! Let us know what you end up using. We’d love to see your pictures! Here are some covers of books my students made after reading Cy Makes a Friend.

I love how grumpy Mama Cyclops and her purple baby look!

Pete the Pasting Pirate: A Glue Stick Lesson

Every year, when we glue something into our journals for the first time, I like to watch how the students use their glue sticks. Over the years I’ve noticed the same mistakes over and over. I’ve grouped these classic blunders into 3 categories; I’m sure you’ll recognize them.

1. The Single Dot: One dot, big or little, in the middle of the paper. Nothing else. Never sticks.

 2. The Power Pusher: Half of the glue stick ends up on this page. It’s lumpy, it’s bumpy, but it will never fall off. Ever!

3. Full Coverage: Every single spot on that paper has glue on it. The student will be asking for a new glue stick by the end of the day.

You’ve seen them all before, haven’t you? But how do you get them to stop?! Enter Pete the Pasting Pirate. This short tale will have students gluing their papers like pros in no time.

Long ago, there lived a pirate named Pam. She was fierce, she was strong but she was always losing her treasures. If she could figure out a way to stop losing them, she would be so much happier! On one of her journeys across the sea, she met another ship captained by Pete the Pasting Pirate. Pete shared his secret for getting treasure to stick around. When you bury your treasure in the right place you will never lose it! “But how do you find the right place?” wondered Pam.

“If you land on a small island,” explained Pete, “you can leave after you make your mark. This is no place for treasure.”

“If you land on a larger island,” continued Pete, “send out a man to walk the edges of the island. If you discover it’s not big enough, sail on. This is still no place for treasure.”

“But if the man walks the edges of the island and discovers it to be quite large,” finished Pete, “then bury your treasure and mark it with an X. You’ll never lose your treasure again!”

“And remember, matey, never press too hard to make your X."

While you tell the story, be sure to model the three types of gluing on different sizes of paper. I hope Pete can help you alleviate some glue stick problems in your classroom!

If you like this story, you can download a mini-poster here.

Pencilpillar

Tired of students losing their pencils? This is a surefire way to change that.

Gather wooden clothespins and medium sized pompom balls. On each clothespin, glue three pompom balls in a line to resemble a caterpillar. You can use multiple colors or matching colors. Glue wiggly eyes on the pompom closest to the end that opens up (opposite the end where you squeeze). After the caterpillar dries, show students how to clamp their pencil in the clothespin. When they aren’t using their pencils, the “Pencilpillars” will stay on their desktops and watch over their pencils so they won’t get lost. I like to start the first day of school with these fluffy fun surprises.

Bad Apple: A Tale of Friendship

We love this book!

We used it at the start of the school year last year and had so much fun we are using it again this fall! It’s an adorable story about an apple named Mac and his unlikely friendship with a worm named Will. There’s game-playing, bullies and an irresistible happy ending. After reading the book, we do different writing activities like “I am a good apple because…” or “A good apple never…”. We also do a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast a friend and a bully and a web containing the qualities of a good friend. This book is an easy way to introduce the rules of your classroom, as well as ways to be a good friend. As a final treat, serve apples and gummy worms!

Guess My Vacation

Save trinkets and treasures from your summer vacation for this back-to-school guessing game. Collect small items that represent the place or places you visited this summer, like shells, postcards, salt-water taffy, key chains, magnets, etc... Decorate a gift bag or lunch bag like ours. 

For kindergarten through second grade we call the game “Guess My Vacation.” For third through fifth, we call it “Guess My Vacation Location.” You can print the label appropriate for your grade level.

Fill the bag with some items from your vacation, plus a sealed envelope containing the name of the place you vacationed. Pull out one item at a time. Ask the class to use their inference skills and guess where you might have gone by looking at each item. Make a list of their guesses. After all items have been removed from the bag, open your envelope to show the answer.

Teachers of third to fifth grade can use trickier items like a picture of the continent where the vacation was located or a postcard of its native animals. Students can guess using the 20 questions method. “Was your vacation in the Northern Hemisphere?” “Was your vacation below the equator?” “Was the climate tropical?”  “Were their mountains?”

As a follow-up, send home paper lunch bags with each student. Have them adhere a label like ours to the front of their bags or let them decorate it themselves. Also give them envelopes and an index card or scrap of paper to write and seal up the answer. Ask them to gather a few small items that represent where they went or what they did on their summer vacation. If any students didn’t go on a vacation, encourage them to cut magazine pictures or draw pictures to show a place they would like to visit.

In a few days, the students will return to school with their bags in hand, ready to play “Guess My Vacation!”

Back to School Sales

It's that time of year again. Time to kick it into high gear for back to school! Since it’s “Tax Free Weekend” in Virginia, which I count as one of my favorite holidays, I’ve been running around to stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Office Depot, Staples, Michaels, AC Moore, etc. scooping up some awesome deals. This week also marks the beginning of my obsessive price checking on back to school supplies. How much are glue sticks at Target? Are they really four for $0.25 at Office Depot this week? (YES!) Will Crayola crayons get down to 25 cents a pack again this year? What are the Staples penny deals?

But there’s one more sale I always look forward to! Last year Ann Marie and I opened our store on Teachers pay Teachers and have had a good time adding products to our listings.

We’ve made lists of our favorite Can’t Miss Books for each month (that you can snag for free), 

shared our fun Reward Coupons for Positive Behavior,

revealed our new way to utilize the Content Word Wall,

and much more. The time has come for it all to go on sale! That’s right, it’s the Teachers pay Teacher Back to School Sale!

You know those items you’ve been drooling over for months and maybe even put them on your Wish List? They could be up to 20% off during this sale! The site wide (seller permitting) sale runs on Monday and Tuesday. However, I can’t count the number of times I’ve missed a sale and kicked myself over it, so we’re going to extend ours until Thursday! If you’ve never visited our store before, you should at least check out “Make Each Day Special.” It's one of our Top 10 End of the Year Traditions and it’s FREE! We use it every year in our classrooms and it’s got some great ideas you can use at home with your own kids as a way to celebrate the end of summer vacation.

What are your favorite ways to gear up for the beginning of the school year?

A Question for Self-Reflection

I was doing my nightly rounds through Pinterest (I love summer vacation!) when I stumbled across a blog I’d never visited before. As I read a few of her posts, Pernille Ripp asked this question “Would you like being a student in your own classroom?” What a profound question! I had never really thought about this before. Yes, I’ve tried to put myself in my students’ shoes before, but never had I considered how I would feel if I were a fulltime student in my classroom. As I make my grand plans for the school year I will keep this question in mind. To help myself to remember, I made this sign.

I hope, upon deep reflections, my answer will be a booming “YES!”

Can You Greet a Brand New Class?

Isn’t it exciting to meet your new students and learn about their diversity? Where Erin and I teach, we are lucky enough to have students each year that represent at least 7-10 different countries. One activity we enjoy doing is learning how to speak words (like hello, good-bye and thank-you) in their native languages. Sometimes the students are too shy to share, so we introduce the concept through this amazing book, Can You Greet the Whole Wide World: 12 Common Phrases in 12 Different Languages, by Lezlie Evans. 

The book teaches many common words and phrases in a basic, easy to learn format. It even includes pronunciations! Sometimes we use the book as an opener to morning meetings, exploring one new word each time. The book’s illustrations are vibrant and colorful and the students love trying to pronounce the words. Even if everyone in your class is a native English speaker, they will still want to try their tongues at something multi-cultural! Arrevederci!

Ann Marie

Top 10 Beginning of the Year Traditions

As the school year begins there are many reasons to become stressed. You have new students who know none of your routines, your class is bigger than you expected it to be, your schedule is constantly being changed, etc.

Instead of giving in to the stress, we try to find ways to make the beginning of school special for our students and fun for ourselves. Here are ten of our favorite beginning of the year traditions.

1. Journey Through the Year: Each month, have your students draw a self-portrait and write their name on a piece of paper. You can use these pages to keep a consistent format. Let students write the name they like to be called. For instance, Ella changed to Eleanor, then to Ellie, and back to Ella throughout the year so it was a fun way to keep track of that. Keep all the pages and at the end of the year compile them into a book that students get to take home. Your students will love to look at their drawing and handwriting skills from September and how they’ve grown.

2. Healthy Snack of the Month: Encourage your students to pack healthier snacks. Feature 1 snack a month, hang a mini-poster and discuss the benefits of the featured food. You can even read books about each snack and do various follow-up activities.

3. Top 10 Monthly Lists: Use our monthly lists, or create your own, to motivate your students and their families to keep learning and exploring at home.

4. Recruit Volunteers: Send home our volunteer request letter and then confirmation form to solicit much-needed help in your classroom. So many parents want to get involved. You may even discover parents who want to help from home if they can’t come in.

5. Get to Know Your Students: Send home our Student Information Sheet on the first day of school. This valuable information gives you immediate and important feedback.

6. Free Snack: During the first week of school, students sometimes struggle to remember routine. Part of our daily schedule includes an optional snack from home. So for the first week of school we bring in snack for our students. This gets them in the habit of remembering for the weeks to come. Some options are cheese crackers, pretzels, granola bars or fruit snacks. Make sure you are aware of any student allergies before buying!

7. First Day Goodie Bag: To settle first day jitters and to make our students feel welcome, we set up goodie bags on every desk. Possible fillers could be: a “Welcome” postcard, a new pencil, a name tag, an eraser, a small notepad, a snack or a sticker to wear. The students love opening the bags as soon as they find their seats. This also keeps everyone busy and buys us time to greet each student or parents as they walk through the door.

8. A Few of Our Favorite Things: Sometime during the first week of school, read, My Favorite Thing (According to Alberta) by Emily Jenkins. Then make a class book with a similar title such as: Our Favorite Things (According to Mrs. ____’s Class).

9. Take a Tour: After going over all the important information, rules, introductions and drills, make some time to take a tour of the school and playground. This helps new students to become familiar with their surroundings and also gives a nice review to our young students who tend to forget their way. Make sure to point out rooms to which you will be frequently sending students (for example, other classrooms on your grade level).

10. One Time Show-and-Tell: Usually after kindergarten, we do away with weekly show-and-tell. But have you ever noticed how many students still ask to bring things in? Sometime during the first week of school, read Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox. Discuss the objects Wilfrid has and why they are special to him. Then invite your students to participate in a “One Time Show-and-Tell”. No matter what grade you teach, encourage students to bring one item that will fit in a brown lunch bag. (Send home a lunch bag the day before.) If someone forgets their item, have them draw a picture or write about their special item on an index card to share.

What are your favorite beginning of the year traditions? Let us know!

Robopops

My Back-to-School theme is going to be Robots. I found lots of cool stickers, borders and cut-outs from teacher catalogs but I really wanted some kind of treat for each student. So I created Robopops!

I can’t lie, they are a smidge high maintenance, but totally worth the effort. Print out my list of supplies and the directions to make your own! Let us know if you think of anything to improve the design. 

Ann Marie

Pictures of Parents

The day after Open House/Back-to-School Night, my students are in awe that their parents were actually in the classroom and sitting at their desks the night before. (That is, if they didn’t come with their parent.) To prove it, I take pictures to convince my students that their mom or dad was really there. It’s fun to leave the photo on a child’s desk and see the reaction the next morning. If you don’t have time to print the pictures, take a group shot of everyone and project it on your SMARTBoard for your students to see as soon as they walk in!

Back-to-School Mini Units

We spend our summers dreaming up fabulous and sometimes elaborate units to wow our students in the fall. Then, when we go back to school, curriculum maps, required standards and other time-consuming mandates get thrown at us and suddenly the life is sucked out of our once brilliant ideas. Sound familiar?

Since we are rule followers we stick to the maps and standards and teach what we are supposed to teach when we are supposed to teach it. However, we also like to throw in our own creative ideas when time allows. This year, we are trying Mini Units. We chose eight books with strong main characters to use for eight weeks.

Elements we will focus on are: character traits, setting, problem, solution and reflection. We also developed extension ideas for higher achieving students. If you’d like our journal prompts you can snag them here.

Our exploration of these story elements will begin with Fancy Nancy. Throughout the first week we plan to project samples to model each element on our SMARTBoards.

We will begin independent journal entries on week two. Each assignment modeled in week one will be completed in the students’ writing journals (you can see our specific plans here). They will only need to glue in small headings to identify which element we’re focusing on that day. If time allows (ha, ha) we will incorporate other books about the same character into the week. If not, we will at least make the books available for classroom checkout.

If you include Mini Units in your plans this year, let us know how things went for you!