Books for the Beginning of the Year

Nothing is more exciting (and more nerve wracking) than the first day of school! Sharing a book with your students is an important way to connect, set expectations and relieve first day jitters. Below are my favorite books to start the school year on a positive note.

1. The Kissing Hand

How could I not? This is a first day classic for a reason. The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn is a touching story about a little raccoon who is scared for his first day at school. Chester's mom kisses his hand so that he can take her kiss to school and be comforted by her presence. This heartwarming tale can be paired with a variety of craft activities to help your little ones settle in to the new school year and grow used to being apart from their grown ups. 

2. All the Ways to Be Smart

All the Ways to Be Smart by Davina Bell is a gorgeous rhyming book full of colorful illustrations that capture students' attention. It challenges traditional beliefs about what it means to be smart and celebrates all the different qualities that are unique to us. Every child who reads this joyous book will find something that affirms their diverse talents. This is another book which lends itself nicely to start of the year crafts, I have a rainbow craft that makes a fabulous and eye-catching door display available in my TPT store. 

3. Blue Flower

Blue Flower by Sonya Hartnett is a touching and heartwarming tale of a young girl who finds herself out of place and scared at school. Through her love of art she discovers that her individual differences and creativity are what make her special. This gentle exploration of individuality and emotion make for a truly special book your students will request time and time again. 

4. Have You Filled a Bucket Today?

Simple metaphors of bucket filling and dipping helps children to see how their actions affect both themselves and others. A wonderful book to encourage students to express kindness and care for their peers and nurture empathy in your classroom. There are also a plethora of fantastic crafty activities to go with the book available on TPT!

5. Our Class is a Family

This book perfectly highlights just how expansive our job as teachers is! This is a wonderful book that helps you to build a sense of community in your classroom from the first day. Your students will learn that their classroom is a safe place for them to learn, make mistakes, and most importantly a place for them to be a friend to others. Like many of the others on this list, there are a tonne of great activities to paired with this heartfelt read available online. 

 

6. A Letter From Your Teacher

Another beautifully written and heartfelt story from Shannon Olsen, A Letter From Your Teacher (On the First Day of School) is an encouraging story that helps teacher welcome their new students on the first day of school. Perhaps the most lovely aspect of all, is that the last page has a blank space for you to sign your name so your students know the sincere message of care, guidance and love is coming straight from you!

7. Invisible Boy

Finishing my list of perfect start of the year books is Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig. This gentle story teaches children that small acts of kindness make a big difference. Brian the invisible boy goes most days unnoticed by his peers until Justin the new kid joins school, and he and Brian team up for a project. This poignant and tender book sensitively addresses the isolation that can plague our quieter students, and encourages the more extroverted among them to express the simple act of friendship to all. 

Let me know in the comments if there are any of these titles that you love to use in your classroom, or if you have any to share with others!

10 Indoor Recess Must Have Items

INDOOR RECESS ... 2 words that strike fear into the hearts of teachers everywhere. Luckily, I have 10 activities and games that will keep your classroom from sounding like someone let the monkeys out of the zoo. Use these great activity ideas to keep you sane, your students entertained, and best of all students ready to learn in the next lesson!

1. How to Draw Corner

Totally independent and perfect for encouraging calm vibes in your room, how to draw pages are perfect for indoor recess. Simply print some out and file them in a plastic pocket binder, pop them out on a table with pencils and paper. Website: https://howtodrawforkids.com/ has a great selection of simple drawing instructions that are easy to download and print.

2. Puzzles

There is something wonderful about puzzles that encourages teamwork, collaboration and communication among students. This classic mindful past time will have students learning and relaxing at the same time. Usborne has a wonderful selection of fantastically priced jigsaws available from their website and Amazon. The illustrations are delightfully colorful and I find 100 pieces to be perfect for 1st Grade students. 

3. Coloring Pages

There always the kids who want nothing more than to zen with a coloring page during indoor recess. Luckily, this is one of the easiest activities to set up thanks to some beautiful and FREE coloring sheets available on TPT. There is a huge selection of free resources on TPT so you can even change up the coloring sheets depending on the seasons and holidays. 

4. Fun Books

Want something that will last your students a little longer than just recess? Fun books are a fantastic way to keep students entertained for long periods of time. These fun books available on my TPT store are packed full of literacy and numeracy based activities that are engaging and able to be independently completed. You can purchase them individually or in a great value year long bundle by clicking the picture below:

5. Board Games

You can go wrong with a carefully curated collection of board games. Just be mindful of something I have learned the hard way through years of teaching - think about the noise and excitement level each game is going to produce. If calm vibes are what you're after, think twice about that game of Jenga! Target has a great selection of well priced board games your students will love.

6. Mystery Pictures

It doesn't matter the weather, some students just love to learn and want nothing more than to chill with a worksheet. My mystery pictures are perfect for students who need a little during wet day timetable. I have a selection that covers every season and holiday for the year - a fun way to practice their place value knowledge!

7. Kinetic Sand

Bring the sandpit inside with kinetic sand - this sounds like a terrible idea if you don't have the correct set up! Be sure to provide trays for students to keep their sand in one place (and off the floor). There are a bunch of really fun kits available beyond just sand that will encourage your students' creativity. 

8. Where's Wally?

A throwback to most of our childhoods with Where's Wally books. These books are fun and engaging, and students love to make it a competition who can find Wally first. Where's Wally books are sold in many book stores and online.

 

9. Play-dough

A timeless classic among all students, play-dough is a winner for wet day timetable. Be sure to set out some ground rules for play-dough including not mixing the colors together to avoid multiple tubs of brown dough that loses its appeal pretty quickly! Play-dough is widely available at many stores including Target which also sell cute themed sets. 

10. Go Noodle

We all have those students who need to move during their recess and lunch breaks. Luckily this list has something for absolutely everyone: Go Noodle is a fantastic way to encourage your active students to get the wiggles out of their system. There is a tonne of research that shows kids need to move in order to learn so don't shy away from this fantastic opportunity to harness the energy into some fun dancing!

 

11 Activities to Improve Phonological Awareness

Hello Friends! 

Today I am writing a post on how to improve phonological awareness skills in your class. This is the overarching skill that strongly predicts later success in reading and writing - think of teaching students to read and write like building a house. You must lay strong foundations for the house it be built on, or it will all fall apart, no matter how well built the house is. By focusing on and honing phonological awareness skills, you are ensuring that the house has a strong, solid foundation to begin. 

The term 'phonological awareness' encapsulates a wide range of skills that allow students to listen for and manipulate the spoken segments of words as well as sentences. It also includes 'phonemic awareness' under its umbrella, which refers to the ability to manipulate individual sounds within words.

If you want to read more about phonological awareness and its importance - check out my more detailed blog post here.

Let's get to it! Here are my top 10 activities for building phonological awareness in young students:

1. Syllable Names

This activity is so easy and engaging and requires absolutely no prep. In this activity, get students to clap the syllables in their names. If students are struggling with how to identify syllables, ask them to place their hand under their chin and say their name very slowly. Each time their chin touches their hand, it is one syllable.

Create a T-chart on the board and see whose name has the most syllables!

You can use many other interesting words to identify syllables too, like favorite zoo animals, food, etc. 

2. Percussion Party

Read a rich text together - choose a popular book your students love. Take a sentence from the story and have students 'play' with body instruments to show the syllables or number of words. Students can pat their knees, clap their hands, or drum the floor to find out how many syllables there are in the words and whole sentence. 

3. Rhyme Puzzles

Rhyming puzzles are a great way to get students to identify rhyme, an important skill that precedes the ability to generate rhyme. This activity will be best used with younger level students who are just starting to develop their ability to identify rhyme.

You can grab these fantastic rhyming puzzle cards on my TPT store:

4. Rhyming Stories

Reading stories with students that have rhymes in them is an amazing way of supporting phonological awareness. Unlike the rhyming puzzles, this activity will rely on some more advanced phonological awareness skills to generate the unknown rhyme. When reading books with rhymes, I will pause at the rhyming word and allow my students to fill in the gaps orally. This is a great way to provide immediate responsive feedback to their answers: 'hm, do c-at and d-og end in the same sounds?' 

Below are some of my favorite books to use for an activity like this:

5. Onset and Rime Cards

Onset and rime cards are a great way for students to practice recognizing chunks in words, some of which are extremely common and seen across many words included in early texts. These onset and rime cards are fantastic for students to practice building word families, as well as listening to individual sounds in the words. 

You can grab a set of onset and rime cards in my TPT store below

6. Initial Sound Bingo

Being able to identify the initial sound of a word is a crucial first step in segmenting and identifying individual phonemes in CVC and longer words. There are many fun ways to practice initial sounds. If you want a tonne of ideas check out my post on my top initial sound activity ideas here.

My favorite way to practice initial sounds on a whole class level would definitely be initial sound bingo. It really brings out the competitive spirit among my students and is a lot of fun. 

Grab a copy of my Initial Sound Bingo on my TPT store here:

7. Build-A-Bear

I'm sure plenty of us grew up with the popular game 'hangman', while the premise of Build-A-Bear is almost exactly the same, I use a slightly more kid-friendly twist. The key difference in this game is that I don't spell words on the board by their individual letters, rather, use phonemes within the word to promote revision of learned sounds and decoding and spelling skills.

Here is an example of a completed game:

I use longer lines to indicate digraphs and trigraphs, and short lines to indicate single letter sounds. This game is fantastic as it rehearses how words and phonemes actually fit together, rather than learning words by wrote memory. 

8. Car Park Sounds

Car Park Sounds is hands-down one of my all-time favorite activities. It targets so many different skills of phonemic awareness, including initial sounds, final sounds, deletion, insertion, segmenting, and blending. 

This activity takes a little preparation beforehand - you will need to compile a list of around 15 words that have a focus phoneme in them (i.e., ch, t, ing). Arrange the words so that each time you read a word, only one or two of the sounds change. For example, when teaching the /oa/ digraph, I might use a list of words like boat, goat, gloat, bloat, etc.  

Students use whiteboards for this activity and do not rub out and re-start each time you say a word, they will only identify the sound that changes, erase that and replace it with the new sound. 

I cannot overstate how much I love this activity, how engaging it is, and what amazing opportunities it gives you for immediate and responsive feedback to students. 

9. Boo Hooray!

Another fantastic versatile game to play with students who just love being able to boo and hooray you! This game can be played with literally any sound you are learning, as well as with rhymes. It is super simple - say words that do or don't have the target phoneme in them, students can yell 'BOOO!' when the word does not have the sound, and 'HOORAYYY!' when it does. 

This activity can be used for rhymes too, just choose a target word like 'cat', and say words that do and don't rhyme with it.

10. Word Circles

This game is fantastic for quick line-up situations, or when you have just a few minutes to spare at the end of a lesson.

Knowing how to count and distinguish between words is an essential skill that I see an astounding number of students struggling to achieve. It is a deceptively difficult task if reading and writing is not a skill that comes naturally to your students. 

Say a simple sentence to your students (i.e., the cat is fat). Only choose 4-6 words tops, they need to remember it. Move down the line/around the circle and each student says a word in the sentence each. Ask some students to identify how many words were in the sentence. 

11. CVC Sounds

I love this activity, it is a zero prep and very powerful and effective way to reinforce skills of segmenting. It can also be played as a whole, small, or individual sized group activity - so versatile and easy!

Ask students to identify the initial, end, or medial sound in CVC words. I have a script that I tend to follow, as below:

Teacher: Initial sound in cat

Students: cat, c, c, cat

Teacher: End sound in cat

Students: cat, t, t, cat

Teacher: Middle sound in cat

Students: cat, a, a, cat

This is an amazing activity that can be changed to suit all skill levels - lower levels would stick to initial sounds, progressing to end sounds, and finally to medial sounds with more advanced students. 

I hope you found something new to try with your students from this post! Let me know in the comments how it went for you!