Start the School Year: Favorite Back to School Books

I suppose I am like any other teacher in the world. I have my go-to activities, my go-to books that I like to use to start the school year. I use them year after year. But I also like to collect new books to sprinkle amongst the old. I am a book lover from way back, and that keeps me hunting and looking, always, for fresh books to share at the start of the school year.

This year, I have purchased a few new ones. You can check out my staple books to start the school year on this blog post.

Last year, I ran into Adam Peterson's Instagram account via searching for ideas on kindness. He started a Yellow Day movement that focuses on being kind. He has a guinea pig for his class pet, just like me! He also wrote an amazing little book about kindness called Gigi's Yellow Garden. With a pet guinea pig in the classroom, this is the perfect book for my class! I also love that it is illustrated by a student! I mean, how fun is that?

This one may just turn out to be our guinea pig, Ginger's favorite book this year!

Another book I got was recommended by Amy Lemons from Step into Second Grade (on Instagram). She has this Rooted in Reading series that she created for TPT and is creating a new lesson for the book, Being Frank. After hearing her talk a little bit about this book, and seeing a preview of her resource, I knew this would be a perfect addition to my collection. It is about a boy named Frank who is just too...well, Frank! He says whatever is on his mind whether it is kind or not. This book will open up a lot of conversations about the power of our words and about not saying everything you are thinking. I have heard students say, "I don't mean to be mean, but..." right before they go ahead and say something extremely unkind. I know I can't be the only teacher who has experienced this. I am excited to use this book to talk about what is appropriate and also to teach that words do matter and have power. 

The last book I picked up was recommended by  Wild Things Learn, also on Instagram. It is called, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I loved her idea of using this book to celebrate the grand opening of our library with much fanfare. It is a great way to talk about the importance of books in our lives and why they matter so much. 

New books are always exciting! I can't wait to share these new reads with my new class in August.

Start the School Year with Organization

Starting the year with organization is simple...keeping it that way throughout the year is not. I am generally not a naturally organized person, so setting up some routines and having a place for everything is a MUST if I want to stay organized. Here are some of my favorite tips for organizing a classroom at the start of the year. I am going to share my favorite storage solutions as well.

1. Have a place for everything. 
Whatever you do, find storage solutions for all the things you will use in the classroom. If that means baskets (hello Reggio teachers), bins, file cabinets, whatever you use, place items in something to keep things sorted and ready for students or yourself. Don't have a catch all organization method where all the leftover items you don't know what to do with get dumped. It will not be efficient or effective. A few years ago, I transitioned into this mindset after viewing classroom upon classroom that was so beautifully organized. I realized that it was the storage solutions that made it that way. So, sort your classroom materials. Put items that are the same together in one container. Label everything for easy clean up for your students and teach them how to return items to the appropriate spot. Do not assume that they will just simply do it on their own. Be explicit in your teaching. 

2. Make organization simple for your students.
Again, storing like items in one bin and labeling everything is a great place to start. It sets clear expectations as to where items should be returned after use. I like to also place bins in alphabetical order. This helps students find things quicker than if they are placed in a random order. 

3. Build in time for cleaning.
Students should be responsible for helping to clean the classroom. This is REAL life training, teachers. Students will be less likely to make a mess if you expect that they help in the clean up process...and your janitor will thank you for it! So, schedule some time at the end of every day to do just that. All you really need is to have 15-20 minutes of time. You can have jobs posted that rotate, or use an economy system where students earn classroom money for doing jobs. Or you can simply see what needs to be done and have students pitch in. I love to use this method for helping cleanup go quickly or this method for making sure the floor stays nice and neat.  

4. Clear your desk and teacher table everyday while the students clean up their areas.
Let's face it, starting the year with organization means making yourself keep surfaces clean. Let's face it, papers pile up and that can detract for an organized classroom. Make it a ritual to clear every surface at the end of every day.

5. Make filing papers a priority. 
Now that you have made a pact with yourself to keep the surfaces clean, give attention to each paper that built up throughout the day. If it is something you no longer need, throw it away. If it is something you need, file it or place it neatly in the correct storage spot. If it is a set of papers you need to grade, clip it together and place it in the correct bin or into your teacher bag to take care of at home (if you take work home). 

What are your best tips for starting the school year with organization? Let me know in the comments below.

Start Your Year on a Positive Note...and Keep it That Way

Starting the school year can be a challenge. I like to start it on a positive note and work hard throughout the year to keep it that way. Here are five easy tips to help you start your year off on a positive note and keep it that way too.

1. Send a letter of greeting to each parent. If you can get a hold of parent addresses about a week or so before school starts, send a letter of greeting to each parent introducing yourself and telling something about you. Be sure to include some things students will be learning during the school year. I also like to send a post card to greet the students individually. Students LOVE to get "real" mail and parents will enjoy passing this note along to their child. 

2 . At the start of the school year, call every parent within the first week. Seriously, take the time to call each one and thank them for entrusting their child to you. Tell them that you look forward to working as a team and share something positive that you have noticed about their child. It is so important to do this before any misbehaviors have a chance to happen. Generally, students are in the honeymoon stage the very first week of school, so I choose to make a phone call home during this time so that the first contact from me once school has started is a positive one. 

3. Set up a communication binder. Be proactive and set one up before school even starts. Keep a record, throughout the school year, of each and every communication. It can save you if you are ever in a tough spot. Documentation is key. Save every email. Document every phone call. Write down conversations you have with parents in person. This will help you keep track of all interactions. I like to keep a binder where I can write down each and every interaction. 

4. Send positive notes home. I set a goal to try to send one positive note home at least every two weeks to each child in my class and while I am not always able to accomplish that, parents really do enjoy getting little notes of praise from the school. To do this, keep a clipboard of positive note printables on a clipboard. Write each child's name on one of the notes. When you see something to celebrate, write a quick note. Send it home at the end of the day. Doing it this way helps you keep track of who you still need to send notes home with. I use one of these cute little printable note sets to keep it super simple. 

Here is another piece of advice on this one. If you have a child who is not easy, and let's face it, there's usually one every year, give these notes of praise even more often. Remember teachers, fair is not always equal. Fair is making sure each child receives what he or she needs and I make sure the students in my class know that they will not all be treated exactly the same because that may not be what he or she needs. Students with difficulties often have low self esteem, but you can help build that child up and strengthen your relationship with him or her by looking for things he or she is doing well or right. Be sure to be sincere and let him or her know exactly what you appreciate.

5. Have an open door policy. I know teachers who never give out their personal phone number or only allow parents to see them at certain times. I want my parents to feel and know that I am available to help them when needed. In the twenty years I have been teaching, I have NEVER had any parent overuse my phone number. Instead they are always respectful, apologetic, and thoughtful when they have to use it during my personal time. It certainly gives them a feeling that I care about their child and them and that feeling goes a long way. I am available to meet with parents after school as needed. It is not often that I need to meet with a parent or take a phone call, but I want them to know that I am there if they need me. 

Good communication will knock out a whole host of problems before they have a chance to begin. It is the number one way to keep parents informed, feel a part of the school experience, and be on your side. It is worth the time and effort. I am not a natural communicator. I am a quiet person, but knowing this about myself has made me push myself even harder to keep up the communication. So let's do it! Let's start this year on a positive note...and keep it that way.

If you need some resources to help, you can check these out. Click on the pictures below to be taken to the store.

Back to School Activities

Do you have back to school activities that you reuse year after year? I am that kind of teacher for sure. But I am also the teacher who is constantly trying out new things and tweaking things to make them better. Sure I still have my go-to list of ideas, but I also like to spice up the back to school activities to make them even better. Today I want to share with you five things I like to do with my students during back to school time.

1. Name Tags
I love setting out huge name tags for my students on the first day. When they arrive, it doubles as an activity that they can do while waiting for class to start. First I print out every child's name as large as I can on legal sized paper. I use a hollow font so that the name is outlined with a blank area inside. I make the lines thick in Photoshop so that all the letters touch. I do this so that later the name can be cut out as one piece instead of as individual letters. I make sure to double check the spelling of each name, cause it would be awful to arrive on day one to see that your teacher had written your name wrong. As students arrive, I usher them to their seats and ask them to decorate their name. If they finish early, I have them also cut it out. After school, I put them up  on a bulletin board that also has space to display a piece of work beside their name. It is an instant display. After all these years of teaching, I have found one thing to be true, kids everywhere LOVE to see their own work on display. 

2. Get to Know you Activities
If students have been in the same school for a while, they will probably already know a lot of their classmates. But as things usually go, there are new students that have come in over the summer. It is so important for me to get the class started by introducing ourselves and getting to know about things we have in common. This can be done in a simple sharing style, like going around and saying your name and also something about you such as your favorite color, or even better, turn it into a game...who doesn't like a game? With nerves so high on day one, playing a game can be a non-threatening way to calm those nerves and help students get to know one another. 

A simple game to get you started is just to have the students stand in a circle. Start with a ball. A student will throw the ball to another classmate and say their own name like, I'm April and you are ______. If they do not know the student's name, the other student will say his/her name and play will continue until all students have had the ball. Throw the ball around the entire circle several times (in the same order) to help students start to learn each other's name. 

Another back to school game I really like is called Everybody in my Family. To play this game, students will be in a circle, with each student standing on a paper plate. One player, usually the teacher, will start out. He/she will be inside the circle. The player in the circle will say, "Everybody in my family...." and then will name one thing about them such as, "Everybody in my family is good at gymnastics." Or "Everybody in my family loves pizza." Or Everybody in my family has a sister." Then all the other students that have that in common with the player in the middle, will come off his/her plate and run to another plate. The student who does not get a plate goes to the middle and says something about their own family. You can continue to play for as long as you like, but usually 5 minutes or so is just right for a quick and easy way to get to know a bit about one another. 

One other activity I love is to give each student a pair of Lego glasses (these can be purchased on Amazon) and a box of Legos to share. Students then use the Legos to build onto their glasses. They build something they like or you could have them build something to represent their favorite thing about school. Be sure to take pictures of each student as they finish their designs.

A new get to know you activity I tried last year was by the fabulous >>>>> She is the most amazing art teacher. 

3. Team Building
If your classroom is like my classroom, students work in teams a lot. To help them learn to work together, I give them several team or class challenges that they work on during the back to school week. There are so many different types of challenges out there. I like to shake it up sometimes and try different ones that I have found. 

A great activity from the book, Making Learning Magical, is to have students write down three of their favorite things.  After they have written all three, take a little break to share with students some of your own favorite things. You can do this in a powerpoint (for older students) or as a show-n-tell (for younger students). 

After sharing, pass out Play-doh to all the students. Tell them to use the Play-doh to sculpt one of their favorite things. As students work, be sure to walk around the class, engaging them in conversations about what they are making. Have them share with their groups what they have made. 

During the next day of class, a fun way to bring it all together is to have them work in teams to find one thing they all have in common. The teams can create a poster, make an art project or another sculpture to share with the class what they have in common. 

Another fun activity that I have done before is a spin off the show Chopped. This, however is an art challenge. Students get a bag of mystery supplies and they have to use what is in the bag to create something with their team. Teams will share their creations with the class. Teams are scored on how well they work as a team and also creativity and presentation.

These are just two activities that I will use this year, but there are so many amazing ways to get your teams working together. 
  
4. S.T.E.M.
S.T.E.M. challenges are all the rage right now. These are great for helping students learn to work together and persist through an activity. There are really so many S.T.E.M. challenges that you can find for free by doing a search or that you can purchase from Teachers Pay Teachers.

5.  Books
Books are a great way to calm nerves and also help set expectations for kindness from the first day. Some of my favorite books are:

First Day Jitters

Enemy Pie

Mean Jean Recess Queen

Each Kindness

Be Kind

There are just so many books to love and share. 


In case you are looking for some back to school activities, you can check out some that I have available by clicking the labels below.

Art Team Building Activity

Bulletin Board Activity

Toy-Story-Classroom-Transformation

A Toy Story classroom transformation is the most fun you will have all year! Seriously, there is just so much engagement in something like this that it makes the work in preparing it all worth while! 

For my Toy Story classroom transformation, I started with some ideas from none other than the amazing Hope King (I just happened to visit The Ron Clark Academy last year while she was doing her Toy Story classroom transformation and you can read all about my experience here and here). I was also fortunate enough to go to the Get Your Teach On Conference and hear all about the activities Hope did for her transformation (you can catch up on that over here). I also scoured the internet for other ideas for decorating my classroom. Hope's decor was amazing, but I needed something a little bit more budget friendly. I landed on Amy Lemon's page here and found that she also had a video explaining all about the transformation and how some other teachers all got together and created this experience in each of their rooms...a bit differently according to their personalities. You can find a Facebook live for that right at the bottom of her blog post. She really focused on creating the Toy Story classroom transformation on a budget, which I LOVE!

So here is a peek at what I did to set this Toy Story classroom transformation up. It was not that hard and did not take me more than a few hours of time, but the results and the reactions from the students make it all worth while.

First, I purchased some white poster board, colored poster board, foam board, 4 square boxes, some tablecloths. These supplies are all very cheap and can be purchased from Walmart for not much more than $10. I created some kid-like drawings to represent the drawings in Andy's room from the movie Toy Story. I covered the boxes in brown paper that I already had and cut out some strips from my classroom stash of construction paper and added around the border on the front of each box. I cut out a letter for each box to spell the word Andy. 

For the claw machine, I took a box I already had, cut out a window and covered it in a garbage bag. I used plastic wrap for the window. I cut out shapes from red poster board to make a rocket ship and glued it onto foam board for durability. I threw in some Easter grass that I already had and purchased a few green Easter eggs. I added three wiggly eyes to each egg to make little aliens and put some math problems inside. We used a pair of kitchen tongs as the "claw" to grab out space aliens for this activity. I borrowed Toy Story characters from my son and also purchased two inflatable crayons from Amazon for super cheap. 

I added blue tablecloths to the wall and created clouds from white poster board . I created an Etch-a-Sketch by adding a red frame around my smart TV from red poster board and added some white lids for the dials. I also cued up the Toy Story theme song and playlist to start us off.  

At each table, I placed a different color of tablecloth. I put a small strip of a cow-themed tablecloth on top and added boxes with supplies for the activities as well as a sprinkling of aliens toys, army guys, and small Lego boxes that I found at Dollar Tree. I placed a cowboy hat and bandana at each spot for the students to use during the transformation. I have had both of these for a while and keep them to reuse. 

I did not decorate the entire room, but just a piece at the front, as you can see here. I also cut out letters to spell Toy Story from red and yellow poster board to add to the backdrop.  

Outside of the room, I placed a poster that said Andy's room. I hung black tablecloths over the sliding doors in my room, so no one could see inside.

When my class came up to my room that morning, they saw the poster and the black tablecloths....well, to say they were excited would be an understatement! They were jumping up and down and asking a thousand questions....engagement from the beginning. I LOVE that so much! They had experienced other transformations throughout the year, so they knew they were going to have an amazing time. You can check out some of my other transformations here, here, here, and here. 

The focus of most of the activities was STEM and teambuilding. I used this during the last week of school when students had a hard time staying focused on work. This transformation helped to change things around for them. The challenges I used were mostly ones from Hope King that I experienced myself at Get Your Teach On. 

One of the activities that I threw in on this transformation was an unlock challenge. I had never done one in my classroom before, but it was super easy to set up and I had experienced one at Get Your Teach On when I went to the conference. I found this one that was called Save the Toys on TPT, printed the tasks, purchased 4 tool boxes from Dollar Tree and also some locks on Amazon (as described by the Save the Toys activity). Overall, I really loved this activity. I found out, though that some groups will have a hard time sticking with the task. Some were not able to solve the codes on the first try and for some, they had several tries. Next time, I will prep them with some strategies for failure and getting up and trying again.

Next year, I am moving schools and also going from second grade to 3rd/4th. I am planning to use this transformation again. I saved everything and plan to use it at the beginning of the school year instead of the end. I think it will be a perfect way to build community at the beginning of the year and review some content that students have already learned in years past. 

Transformations can be a lot of work, but they don't have to be. You can put into it whatever you want. I have done very simple ones and ones way more elaborate than this one. 

Transformations can be expensive, but they don't have to be. You can spend whatever you want on it. For a budget-friendly transformation, use items you have, check out things your own kids have, ask friends, and also don't forget Dollar Tree. You will be surprised what you can find there.

This year I have three new transformations I want to add it. I have been dying to do a glow transformation. I also want to do a candyland one and a cupcake shop for math. Is it a lot? Maybe, but I am determined to continue to grow and use engaging methods that do not sacrifice rigor, but stimulate it, and I have found no better way to reach those goals.

Just-a-Teacher-Starting-Her-Summer-Break

I'm just a teacher starting her summer break. Today was the last day I "had" to check in. We've been out of school for an entire week, but I had so much to do to get things cleaned up and to finish off the school year grades. 

I am moving and that always makes the clean up tasks more tedious. I have had to move classrooms the last three years. Last year my school closed and opened a new one, so that meant not only a move to a new room, but to a new school as well. This year, I am moving to a completely different school in a different town. It is not, however, completely new to me. I actually taught there nine years ago and am "coming home"! 

Not only am I teaching in a new location, but I am switching back to third and fourth grades, which I taught for eight years before teaching second for the last two. 

So today, I turned in my computer, my key, my report cards, and also my receipts. I took a few last pictures of my class...for old times sake (I've been in this community for the past nine years). Now it's off to new adventures with my family. 

Of course I promised the babes (poor teacher kids have to live at the school even when summer started a week ago) ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery to celebrate. It may be my favorite place...I cannot resist the cake batter ice cream with peanut butter cups mixed in. 

Here's to summer vacation!

Positive-Notes-for-Students

I don't know about you, but I LOVE giving out positive notes for students. I am realizing that this year (while teaching at a first year school that is starting from the ground up) I have not been as intentional on this as I was last year. I would LOVE to get back on the 
bandwagon.This cute little clipart pack that I picked up a while back was my inspiration to get back in the swing of things and start appreciating the beauty I am seeing in my 
classroom each day. It helps me stay positive to actually look for things to celebrate instead of focusing on the difficult parts of the day.  

I usually do not send out a note to everyone all at once, but when I announce that I have some positive notes for students, the excitement and anticipation builds. Students know that if today is not their turn, they will be getting one at some point coming up. 

Here's a look at these little notes that are bringing a smile to my face. End the year strong. Help encourage your kiddos with positive feedback in the scramble toward the finish line at the end of this year.