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!

Head to my store http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/Cassie-Thomas for all of these, many more, and a ton of freebies!!

Also there are new freebies on my facebook page in the comments!

Mrs. Thomas's Class Facebook

Have a great beginning of year y'all! :) Click the blog button below to find many more linked up! 

Fraction Relays

Hey teacher friends! My name is Cassie Thomas and I blog over at Mrs. Thomas's Class/Texas Forever blog! I am a 4th grade writing teacher who has been all over the map since I started my teaching journey!! I taught kindergarten my first year (AND LOVED IT!), moved to 3rd grade ELAR, and then got to loop with my babies to 4th grade writing. Looping has been one of the most rewarding experiences ever, even with being gone on maternity leave. 

I am bringing a post to you today about when I taught my kinder babies fractions. It was the most fun experience, and honestly every student despite what level they were on walked back inside knowing the basic fractions. Texas took this standard out of kindergarten TEKs, but would be fantastic for an end of the year introduction or 1st grade activity! 

 I call it "fraction relays." 

It looks like this: 

Okay, so the above picture is what my fractions were. I bought 10 $1 hula hoops at Dollar Tree and also bought electrical tape to make the fractions. It was surprisingly very easy to do equal pieces. I made 2 1/2's for each group. I did 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, and 1/6.

So I had the kids line up first boys and girls in two separate lines. I had craft sticks and on one side I wrote a fraction, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, etc. Then on the other side I put random colored stickers (yellow, green, purple, and red) 

The first way we played was where they ran through and had a certain amount of time (1 minute) to look at their fraction and run through the line and put their stick in the correct hula hoop. Then I picked them up and checked who got them all right. Whoever got the most right won. We did this way a few times. Then another class that came and watched, they got the chance to do it too. (On Thursday we are going to compete against each other.) 

The second way we played was with the stickers. I knew what the stickers meant, but they didn't. The stickers told me where they went, yellow was 1/2, red was 1/6, etc. I would say a story for each child. For example: I ate half of that donut this morning. They had to listen to my story and go put the stick in the correct place. This made them think so much harder, and I loved it. They had a blast!!!!! I am so so excited. I can't wait to do it against the other class on Thursday! :) 

Let me know what you think!!! 

Friday Flashbacks

My goodness!! We have had SUCH an amazing week, especially considering we had the week before off for spring break. We talked this week about fractions, needs and wants, and started plants. As long as our always consistent writing, reading, making new words, compound words, CVC, CCVC, and I introduced digraphs and blends. I also introduced yoga as a brain break! They loved it!! It's been an amazing week. My babies make me SO proud. Here are a few flashbacks: 

Have an amazing weekend! 

Mrs. Thomas