Start the School Year on the Right Foot

 

Start the new school year off on the right foot with one sole-full day of activities.

This thematic unit is the perfect way to introduce your learners to each other, classroom  procedures, expectations, as well as multiple curricular disciplines.

Kick off  the new school year by having a SNEAKER DAY!  Invite your students to wear sneakers to school, then fill the day with math, writing, art, and get acquainted activities.

Send a note home to alert parents to their child's need to wear sneakers.

Then use those sneakers for math:

• collect data and create graphs

• measurement

• Venn diagrams

• estimation 

• counting and computation

• and much more!

Sneak in some ELA:

• descriptive words

• writing center with prompts

• and more!

Step up to some arts and crafts:

• sole-full rubbings

• shoestring painting

• and more!

You will love sneaking into a new year!

You may also like:

IT'S FREEBIE TIME!

 

Because I'm thankful for all of my teacher friends, I'm offering this product for FREE this weekend. 

                                 

It makes a great math center for primary students. Watch the video to learn more about it.

Enjoy!

Hanging Out with Stellaluna

Do bats give you the willies?  Then it's about time, teachers, that you met Stellaluna.  

Stellaluna is an adorable baby bat that stars in Janell Cannon's award winning book, Stellaluna.  Although the book was published in 1993, it holds timeless appeal for children.  In fact, just this year, School Library Journal named it one of the "Top 100 Picture Books" of all time.  Stellaluna was featured on Reading Rainbow (my all time favorite TV show for children), as well as in the movie, I Am Sam.  It has also been released in an animated version on DVD by MGM & Scholastic.  

If you haven't fallen in love with Stellaluna yet, you need to crawl out from under that rock where you've been hiding!

Before reading this book to my class, I like to do 2 activities.  The first one is designed to gauge their feelings about bats before we study them.  To this end, my students add their name to a graph like this:

[One of my anchor activities each morning is a graph.  My students join the graph of the day upon arriving at school.  There's a new graph every day, so this is a rote action by my kiddos.]

Be sure to save this graph so that you can compare it to your students' feelings about bats AFTER you've studied them.  

The second thing we do is complete a K-W-L chart about bats.  NOW we are ready to read the book.  

By the way, I always pull Stellaluna out in early October.  My school no longer celebrates Halloween.  By studying bats, I can give a nod to this holiday without breaking the rules.  

I hope you will have time to come back soon for more ideas about teaching with Stellaluna.

P.S.  In response to a request, the bat graph is now available via Google Docs.  Use this link: bat graph

You may like these other resources for October:

 


Both are available in either my TpT Store  or my TN Shop.

Sneak into a New School Year -- Pt. 5

It's about time, teachers... to finish up Sneaker Day.

It's never too early to start your class writing stories.  For Sneaker Day, bring in an old, worn out, holey pair of sneakers.  Write a story as a whole class, giving the sneakers a history from the day they were made until today. 

Older and/or more capable students could write a chapter a day, giving you, the teacher, the opportunity to model writing traits and to "think out loud" as you record their ideas. Younger and/or less capable students could write a simple story about who wore the sneakers, where they have traveled, how the sneakers got their holes, etc.  Again, acting as the recorder, the teacher should model her thinking as she write the children's ideas.

Another activity for Sneaker Day is to give each child a blank sneaker outline.

Google doc

Ask them to design a new sneaker that is especially for school children.  What would they include in their special sneaker?  A calculator?  A ruler?  A computer?  A pencil sharpener? . . .  Extend this activity by having the students write about their sneaker's features.

Hopefully, you can use these Sneaker Day ideas to get your new school year off on the right foot!

If you liked these Sneaker Day activities, you may wish to download a copy of the them for FREE on TpT.

 You may also like:

Sneak into a New School Year - Pt. 3 Math Centers

It's about time, teachers, ... to talk about math centers and math activities on Sneaker Day.

No Sneaker Day would be complete without including a graphing activity. Whole class graphs are fun and easy. Line your students' sneakers up in front of the class and ask them to name some attributes they notice.  Use those suggestions or one of these:

• brand
• color (all 1 color, 2 colors, 3...)
• size
• closure (laces, Velcro, slip-ons, ...)
• high tops/low tops
• special features (lights, sequins, pumps, ...)

After you complete 1 or more whole class graphs, you can easily make this activity a math center. Small groups will graph their sneakers, only.

Have each child measure his sneaker using unifix cubes. Ask the children to take their tower of cubes around the room in search of another child with the same number of cubes in his stack.  You have the opportunity to observe and note how children determine if their towers are the same length (counting, comparing side by side, 1-to-1 matching, …). If the activity is going well, extend the assignment to find someone whose sneaker is longer, shorter, 3 cubes longer, 2 cubes shorter, etc. Again, after teaching the task, this activity can be extended by making it a math center activity.

Another math activity for Sneaker Day is patterning. Have your students make crayon rubbings of the soles of their sneakers.  Use the rubbings for creating patterns of footsteps. The rubbings can also be placed in a math center. There, students can sort them according to various attributes you specify. Older or more advanced students could use the rubbings to create categories of their own making.  

Venn Diagrams are another activity that could be modeled to the whole group and subsequently placed in a math center.  

There are more activities for Sneaker Day to come, so sneak back soon.

Mad about March unit FREEBIE

It's about time, teachers....for spring!  At least we can hope.  Yesterday there was snow on the ground; today it's 66.  Gotta love March weather in the heartland!

Speaking of March, I have launched my thematic unit, Mad about March, for primary grades. You can find it on TpT and, now, on Teachers' Notebook.  The unit includes ELA, Math, HOTS, and music curricula.  The ELA activities are:

And here's a FREEBIE from the ELA portion of the unit:

The math portion of the unit includes:

If you like what you see, blow on over to my TpT store or  my Teachers' Notebook store.