If you are looking for a free calendar for your classroom or home--I have one for you! It comes with a calendar template and all the pieces needed (months, days of the week, years, seasons, days, and holidays).

Social-emotional activities have never been more important for younger kids.

This page has a lot of free printable graph worksheet for kids,parents and preschool teachers.

Zamorano Fine Arts Academy student work and real-world collaborations. Art projects created by K-5 students in San Diego.

This page has a lot of Free printable 5 senses worksheet for kids,parents and preshool teachers.eaching kids about the five senses with our five senses worksheets is a great way to help them learn about their powers of perception and how they use them to experience different objects and events. Help your child discover his senses with match-up exercises.

Preschool and Kindergarten children ready to learn the alphabet will love these Free daily Letter of the Day worksheets with a ton of activities!

Here’s a few classroom procedures that have worked well for me – and a couple awesome ideas I’ve run across since I’ve stepped out of the classroom...

Spending the first week of school teaching classroom expectations and procedures is essential for a successful year. Glue is a tricky school supply for many little learners and there definitely needs to be instruction dedicated to teaching learners how to use this tool.Glue BottlesWhen learners are not taught how to use their glue correctly things

Do you use visuals in your classroom? Visuals support students understand what you are trying to teach them. They encourage students to associate pieces of information with visuals. Visual learning helps you to store information for a longer period of time. It is said that videos and images are directly processed by long term memory. The visual ... Read More about Classroom Visuals

I can't believe back-to-school time is coming up so quickly! I've been thinking about my classroom decor and decided to go a little different route this year. I want to try and use as many actual photos as possible to make things super clear for my students and help with explicitly teaching classroom procedures. I've made some new visual posters and wanted to share them with all of you. My first change was with my class rules posters. I have used a modified version of the Whole Brain Teaching rules for the last several years. I also wanted explicit Voice Level posters for my students. If you haven't checked out A Day in First Grade's blog post about her morning meeting, it's a must read {here}. I loved how she gave her students three choices for sitting on the carpet. Last year, I had a lot of students who didn't want to sit criss-cross applesauce. I think my students will be much happier with these options. If you're interested in any of these visuals, you can download them all below for free by clicking on the pictures! I hope these are helpful in your classrooms!

FREE Call Backs and attention getters for the kindergarten classroom! Great classroom management tool!

Practice the concept of sorting and categorizing by identify which summer item is different in this math printable worksheet.

This totally free Preschool Assessment Printable is exactly what you need to assess your preschooler's abilities. This set is a great starting point for kids starting at the age of three.

I'm really working on classroom organization. It improves my productivity with students, so I know it is time well-invested. However, ...

Fall is here and I just LOVE this season! So many reasons to enjoy and appreciate fall! I am have been super busy making a Fall Math and Literacy Packet

Discover Hokusai's 36 views of Mount Fuji with this fun printmaking activity for kids! This Japanese wooblock prints lesson is for preschool and elementary.

Kids absolutely love these snap cube number and pattern activity cards! They are such a great idea to use to help teach numbers and patterns, as well as gross motor skills. Snap cubes make an excellent addition to all centers, and are fantastic boredom busters!

Let's welcome the bugs with these sweet bugs coloring pages for kids!

FREE Phonemic Awareness Activity for Kindergarten. Easy way to incorporate rhyming in Kindergarten. Fun rhyming activity!

This post may contain affiliate links.I have posted about Q-tip painting before, but another therapist has a different twist on it. She has made some templates to do the q-tip painting, which requires more precision in the painting. This is a guest post by a therapist, Tova Stulberger, who made some templates to use when...

My room is finally DONE and ready for kids on Wednesday!!! So… get ready for a picture overload!!! I’m going to start with a broad view and then show everything close up!!! {I realized that I had my camera on the wrong setting when I got home… you have to ignore the ugly halo around […]

{For your convenience, this post may contain affiliate links} Before I had my boys I was a 4th/5th grade teacher and one of my favorite units to teach was Simple Machines. There were so many incredible hands-on learning opportunities with this unit that I just couldn’t fit it all in. One project I always…

MANDALA Treballarem la geometria, els colors i la primavera a través de pètals de colors i fulles. Donarem a cada infant paper de forrar ...

Create a preschool learning activities binder with a free printable for letters and shapes.

Creating a secure and nurturing learning environment is a top priority for educators. One crucial aspect of ensuring student safety is preparedness for

Behold the magic of the elementary art classroom. This blog is intended as a venue for parents and students to check out what is going on in the art room at Thomas Elementary. Also, possibly more importantly, it is a place for other educators to find free art lesson plans and share ideas. Art, art education, art classroom, bottle cap, mural, elementary art blog, painting, ceramics, fun, awesome, interesting.

Here's a simple way to teacher less than, greater than: with toys! Free printable included.

Personal space can be an issue for some students. It affects the student's ability to make and keep friends. The social aspect of school is just as important as the academics. After trying different techniques to help this issue my social worker is credited for giving me the answer. Read the book, Personal Space Camp, to your class. After I read it, I felt like the clouds parted and suddenly the sun began to shine down on the subject of personal space. The book explains the issue is such as way that young students understand what it is and it gives the teacher vocabulary to use with your students. I highly recommend this book!

*If you want to see what I did for 2D Shapes in 2015 click here!* Week 3 and 4 was all about 2D shapes in math! I like starting with 2D shapes because it is something that most of the kids already know and feel successful about. Here is the plan I made to keep me on track. Click on the picture to download a copy! We started by introducing the vocabulary 2D shapes, circle, triangle, square, rectangle, sides and vertices. On the first day we did the first 2 columns of this anchor chart. I made up and used this diagnostic checklist so that I knew how much the kids already knew about shapes. Click on either picture to download the freebie! On the second day we watched "The Very Greedy Triangle" by Marilyn Burns on YouTube. Then we talked about and recorded where we see shapes around us in the examples column. Here are all of the videos that we watched during our 8-day unit. The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns Shapes Song by Kids TV SHAPES by Pancake Manor The Shapes Song by KidsTV123 On the third day I introduced some more shapes with these mini shape posters by The First Grade Parade and then taped them on our cabinets so the students can use them as a resource. You can find them here. The kids used them as a reference to spell the names of the shapes all week long! Next we worked on comparing and sorting shapes. And then did some problem solving questions to challenge my high achievers. This one is Tanya's shape mentioned in Day 8. Use a name of a student in your class where it is blurred! This one was a tricky lesson but my high achievers liked the challenge! We didn't end up doing the sorting quadrilaterals lesson this year (mentioned in Day 6) but what you do is gather shapes that are half quadrilaterals (have a variety like rhombus, trapezoid, square etc.) and not quadrilateral. Get students to sit in a circle and pass out a shape to each student. Put the hoola hoop in the middle. Tell students you are going to make up a sorting rule in your head and they need to guess the sorting rule at the end. Then ask students one by one to put their shape outside or inside the hoola hoop. The first few will just have to guess where their shape goes. If they get it right I say "That matches my sorting rule, you can keep your shape there". If it doesn't I say "Sorry, that doesn't match my sorting rule, please move your shape inside/outside the hoola hoop". At the end students guess the sorting rule. If you have a big class you can get them to guess half way and then make up a new sorting rule for the rest so the ones who have figured the rule out early won't be sitting there bored ;) We displayed our learning on our bulletin board/wall in the hallway. Here are the learning goals and success criterias I posted with our work: And some close-ups of the "shape pictures" that I put up under "show". My ECE sat with the students and coached them on how to draw the shapes and label their pictures. She had the shape manipulatives out so they could copy the shapes they wanted. They turned out so cute and I was surprised how well they could draw already! This activity was open during centre time. The students searched in calendars to find real life shapes, cut them out and glued them on to the corresponding giant shapes made from construction paper. Here are just some of the centres that were open during our 2D shape unit: Sorting tangrams by shape. You can find these mats by clicking here or on the picture below. Making shapes on geoboards. The example pages are from "Geoboard It! A Fun Math and Geometry Station" by First Grade Blue Skies. At "Shake a Shape" there are shapes hot glued on to the inside of the egg carton. A pom pom is placed inside and the student shakes the carton, open it up and traces the shape the pom pom landed on. This activity can be found in "Backpack Boogie" by Growing Kinders. My kids LOVE playdough! These shape mats are a freebie from Miss Kindergarten. On a different day my ECE put out tangrams and asked them to find out how many tangram squares fit in a square, how many tangram triangles fit in the triangle etc. We also used these shape puzzles... and I finally got some insertable dice so we played this game called "Schoolhouse Shapes" from "The Bus Stops Here" pack by The First Grade Parade. The students roll the dice and cover the shape they roll. The first person to cover their whole mat is the winner! I also put these two games on the SMARTBoard for the kids to play. You can find them both at abcya.com. Click on K then scroll down to "more". If you made it this far, thank you for reading! I wish I could share all of the wonderful centres my ECE thought of and put out but I didn't get a chance to take pictures of everything. I hope that you find something useful that you can implement in your own classroom in this post! What is your favourite activity/centre for 2D shapes? Please leave me a comment and let me know! I am always looking for new ideas!

It all started with a field trip to the local trash dump and recycling center. The kids saw so much trash and recyclables in the dumping ar...