Mrs. Thomas's Class: Oh, Snap! It's almost August, y'all!

I didn't even like typing that post title in all honesty. I can't believe summer is dwindling to its end. I have gifted and talented training the whole first week of August (and my birthday is August 5) total bummer. Then just random PDs in between there and our official first week back on August 17. School starts for me August 24, I'm there hopefully 3 weeks before I have my little nugget.

When do you start back?

I am teaming up with a lot of my Teacher Deals and Dollar Steals collaborators to present to you some back to school activities we have in our teachers pay teachers stores that may help make your transition from summer to beginning of school easier!

I'll start with general back to school activities!

The first is my back to school interview cubes! You can find here.

I include directions inside the cubes to help you put them together, or your students can. I had my students work in four groups the first few days of school and then they presented on one person in the room for the class to get to know them. I found that students would rather tell about someone else rather than themselves, sort of an icebreaker.

Here is the cover on TPT.

Here is a picture of a cube put together and one that has not. I would print on cardstock, it makes them hold up a lot better.

So as you can see, the questions are very personal, and what I love the most is that it's requiring the students to think outside of typical questions such as what's your favorite color, food, etc. I have included a recording sheet with the product, but I found last year my students loved writing about this person in their journal to have to look at all year long. At the end of the year they reasked those questions, and to some of their surprise, their thoughts changed - which leads to a good whole group discussion!

The next product I have for $1 that can be used primarily for upper grades is my early finishers journals. I loved this product so much last year in my classroom. I had those students who got done SUPER fast and then would be a big disruption if they were either pretending to read, or bored. These are just covers, I cut out and glued onto the front of spiral notebooks and they could go choose whichever they wanted. My only requirement was that there are NO JUDGEMENTS on what someone else writes, this is a way for them to write back and forth to each other, tell me things they may not be able to, etc. They can leave their name or they don't have to. Some students have never had the option of writing anything they felt down, and this helped. The stories can be real or made up, doesn't matter! It's totally just a way to get them writing, and they don't even realize it's benefiting them!

This is the cover and can be found here on TPT for $1.

This is an example of what one of the covers looks like. Since I am teaching writing this year, I plan on going back and adding a bunch of new titles, so I would get it while it's on $1 if I were you ;)

My favorite thing is replying to the students. I wish I had a picture of the notebooks from last year, but they are in one of my 50 boxes in the garage!!! This year I vow to take more pictures!

Next I have a lot of back to school activities for kindergarten! When I taught kindergarten in summer school I realized that those babies needed some introduction to the basics and created multiple sheets to work with them on to coincide with playdough letters, magnetic letter activities, and shaving cream fun :)

This is a bundle for incoming kinders or even for those struggling kinders who still need help over the summer over basic facts.

Included in this bundle:

ABC tracing papers
ABC book
ABC recording sheets
Colors book
Number tracing sheets
Number book
Number recording sheets
Days of the week book
Shapes book

You can find beginner in kinder here.

Here is also a set of assessment sheets I used for kindergarten.

What I loved about this in kindergarten is that I saw such progress when I did it again and again throughout the year. Here are some examples of my kiddos work in kindergarten. I cried, not going to lie :)

Here is beginning of year work. Super simple to make for the name practice.

Then below is both of these students in April/May.

Full sentences, letters on lines. Melting my heart. :)

There are many things in my store that help with beginning of year. That seems to be the biggest rush of time. I have a lot of sight word fun rotation activities that had my kindergarten students learning words quickly.

If you're looking for organization I have book bins labels as well!