We’ve compiled a selection of hands-on activities and experiments to help show students some of the concepts of photosynthesis in action.

Hi there! This post is about using your students' names as a beginning of the year literacy theme. In kindergarten, these little students are babies! They are just learning to write letters, and names are the most important letters in their world right now. So, using names as a first theme for BTS is a no brainer. Here are a few ideas to help you do some name activities in your classroom. OK, first things first... I do not put pictures of students on my blog very often. When I do, faces are obscured, and permission has been given by parents. THESE ARE NOT PICTURES OF REAL STUDENTS. They are stock photos of kids that I have a commercial license to use. I wanted a few "pretend" kids to show you what I do in my classroom without using my own students' names or pics. Just had to get that off my chest. OK, Back to learning with names... I always start my year with several sets of name cards. It is really nice to make at least one set with pictures of the kiddos. Here are some activities I like to do with names using the cards: This fun student made emergent reader is a favorite with my kiddos all year long. I take each child's photo early in the year. I print out one color photo for each child. Then I make black and white copies of all the photos. I make sure there are plenty to go around. For centers, we make the pages of this book using name cards. I only do a few pages in the books, but you can do as many as you want. The kids simply glue on a picture of a friend and write his or her name in the sentence below. I use the color picture in each child's book for the last page, "I see me!" Since there is no writing involved on that page, I make them, and the kids see it for the first time when they read the assembled book. It's a surprise and they love it! These are a favorite all year long. I love these books because they are a great way to teach all those important early reading skills, especially pointing to the words! It would be really easy to make these yourself. I am sharing this idea freely. So, go for it! If you don't have the time to make it yourself, you can get it in my TpT shop for a buck. Friends - Student made Emergent Reader for Back to School After kids have had practice with writing names in the book, they can continue to practice using a sheet like this. This is super fun to have in your writing center so kids can do it on their own. Make sure you have a set of name cards with it so they can easily write the names. This sheet came from my Print and Go! Back to School (NO PREP) set. We always sort the names by the number of letters in each. This is a fun sheet for each child to do after the name sorting activity. It is a review of writing, number, tally marks, ten frames, and a little face drawing too. You can find it here: Print and Go! Back to School (NO PREP). I also use the name cards to play games with my kiddos during attendance or circle time or whenever I have a few extra minutes with my group. I like to cover the name and just show the first letter. Then kids need to guess who it could be. Once they are familiar with the names in the class, this becomes a great critical thinking activity. When you have two kids with the same first letter, they can then decide who it is by looking at the second letter, and so on. It is lots of fun for beginning of the year letter learning. You can also clap the syllables in each name, do a rhyming game with the names, or phonemic awareness poems like Hickety Picktey Bummble bee, or Banana fanna.... you know those poems right? Just in case you don't, here are examples of them using my name (Katie): Hickety Pickety Bumble bee Can you read this name for me? Katie! Can you clap it? Katie (with a clap). Can you shout it? Katie (shouting)! Can you whisper it? Katie (in a whisper). I do that little poem with sight words too. It is very useful and can be changed up in any way you like, the clapping and shouting part, that is. I recommend that you always end it with whisper, that way you have your group quiet and listening at the end of each name. They can get a little excited with all the clapping and shouting. But, it is lots of fun. Here is the other one: Katie, Katie, bo batie, Banana fanna fo fatie, Me, my, mo, matie, Katie! You can do that one with any word or name. It can get a little tricky wit the long names, but just go for it! The rhyming and alliteration make it a fun way to play with sounds in language. Perfect for our little Kinder friends. Perfect phonemic awareness practice. And it's FUN! Woo hoo! I also do Student of the Day! It is the ultimate in literacy learning through student names. I will do a post on that once I get started with my new group of sweeties. Stay tuned... OK, were you really just looking for this? Here is your Name Bingo freebie. It's a fun and purposeful way to get some name writing practice into your centers time early in the year. First, kids write their name on the grid one letter in each box. Then repeat until all boxes are filled. The photo at the top of the post is an example of how it should look when it is complete. THIS IS HARD FOR KINDERS! So, I highly recommend you do this as a teacher supported activity. After names have been written correctly onto the grid (and traced with marker if you like), then you can laminate, and use these as game boards for ABC bingo with any set of alphabet cards. If you need some cards and other games for alphabet learning, you can find some here: ABC Games! Fun Activities for learning the Alphabet. Just click on the image below to go get your Name Bingo FREEBIE: Thanks so much for stopping by! I hope you found some helpful ideas for your classroom. Happy teaching!

It's time for some fun geography hands-on learning! I love mapping activities and have put together a fun printable set to build a city map. This fun printable set is 15 pages long and includes 5 different

ALL ABOUT EARTH Get ready for a month filled with so many fun activities to teach your kiddos all about our planet Earth . I teach this unit in April so it coincides with Earth Day. I’ve loaded up this blog post post with read aloud book ideas, free videos you can share with your students,

We are starting our unit on Bears! Last week we read many versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Part of our work on the story i...

Use these 7 continents worksheet pagges to teach elementary age about CONTINENTS for kids. Grab continents book printable!

Identify trees by the color and surface of their barks! Learn how to do a tree bark rubbing and download a free poster with matching game!

Here's an awesome collection of The Giving Tree activities and crafts to use at home and in the classroom based on the book by Shel Silverstein.

Help your primary grade students explore, learn, and write about landforms. See our hands-on landforms activities plus our culminating writing project!

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Learn about amazing trees with this fun, and free hands-on unit study. Free nature unit studies for homeschooling from The Crafty Classroom.

Coin Rubbing Money Tree - A Hands-on Money Activity This is a fun way to explore coins in a hands-on way. My kids love anything to do with money: counting money, playing with money, experiments with money, and so on! This is a great way to reinforce coin size, as well as coin recognition as the patterns are rubbed through with crayon. This is LOW prep and can be done whenever you want to introduce, practice, or review coins. What you need: coins (if you have any foreign or unusual coins, this makes it even more fun!) crayons, without their wrapping a bare tree. Paint or draw one yourself, or print out the image below (click to view larger): For a challenge, have your child add up how much their money tree is worth, or see how many of the state quarters they can identify: Some of the state quarters make really nice rubbings! Looking for more Money activities? Learning is so much more fun when you use games, so I have created several games and activities to actively engage students in money: More money activities: Fishing for money at an indoor carnival Pin this idea for later:

This week 4th grade will start their fall birch tree painting! We create these by using.... Materials: 12x18 90lb paper Crayola black tempera paint little pieces of cardboard and tempera cakes for the leaves and grass Day 1: We will look at photos of birch trees online, and talk about the texture of the bark and really examine what these birch trees really look like. I'll demonstrate how to drag the cardboard and black paint across the paper to create this unique bark texture. The students will get a piece of practice paper first, will practice creating these trees until they get the hang of it, and then they'll get their final piece of paper to create their painting on. Here's a picture of how to get started. If you're right handed, swipe your cardboard to the right. Vice versa if you're left handed. I create one side, and then flip my paper around to create the other side of the tree. This makes things so much easier! Here's what the students should finish on Day 1 Day 2: We'll add branches with Sharpies, and paint leaves and grass with our tempera cakes! Here's what they have finished so far! These guys and girls are off to a great start!! You can also change the background up to accommodate for any season. Here's a different arrangement, with snow and sunset colors in the background! “Lauren Stacey is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.”

Two Points: This is MY method, and not necessarily right for you, your teaching or care philosophy, your set-up, or your students. Curriculum participation by my students is VOLUNTARY. I invite them to participate, but if they choose not to, then that is fine. I usually offer them a choice of a few of the activities and let them decide where we start and where we go. An engaged child learns, a dis-engaged child rebels. The 3-year rotating curriculum is theme based. Some times we stick to the plan, but usually I observe what they are interested in learning about, what they are asking questions about, and suggest up to three different themes they can choose from for us to study. I make my own 3-year rotating curriculum for many reasons: Packaged curriculum is often only one year. Since I teach for 3 years, this would be redundant. Most packaged curriculum focuses on skills my students master early. My 2s count to 20, know 11 colors, know most of their phonics, uppercase and lowercase letters, 10 shapes and some of their numbers and I still have 3 years of curriculum to teach them. They often are worksheet intensive. My students usually are cognitively advanced from their fine motor skills. I have 4 year olds that still can't write well. If I had relied on worksheets for the last 2 years, there is no way they would have the skill sets they have. Worksheets are also not considered Developmentally Appropriate Practice [DAP] for children under the age of 8. We use them here for writing practice starting at age 4. [Yes, worksheet-intensive public schools are not using DAP for kindy through 3rd grade!] They can be expensive. If you are purchasing worksheets, why would you spend even $1 a week/$52 a year when you can purchase a 400 page Scholastic preschool workbook from Sam's Club for $8 that covers probably more material, is most likely aligned with the public school expectations, and is colorful. Colored copies are NOT affordable to make from packaged curriculum. Most [ALL!] preschool learning should be interactive. Pinterest is a better source for ideas. My students change every time I do a theme. I have to be able to tweak it to the interests and capabilities of those currently in my care. Plus, I'll find more interesting activities on Pinterest, have an idea for a new game, etc. It's a constant evolution to keep my curriculum relevant to our current group, situation and resources. However, curriculum planning and creation is very time consuming. Even with older curriculum I spend several hours going over it prior to teaching - updating, creating new materials, purchasing and setting new classroom decorations. While I have had my 3 year curriculum, this year I found myself wanting a more specific schedule to focus on specific skill sets for this particular group of children. Most of these skills can be incorporated into our themed curriculum, or they take 5 minute sessions to pop into our day. I have two groups, the younger preschoolers are 2-3 years old and the older ones are 4-5 years old, all at the same developmental and skill set level within their group. This makes it easier, as I can tailor everything to just 2 groups. If I were to have additional levels of children, then it would be tailored to each level. Children here are taught at their developmental level, not age. Asychronastic development is normal, so I may be teaching a child at various levels depending upon the subject matter. For the younger preschoolers, I came up with this structure. For the older pre-k students, I came up with this one. For instance, both of them have Measurement & Comparison on Friday for Reasoning. However, for the younger students, this would be a more/less, longer/shorter, big/little, etc. activity, while the older students would be measuring with rulers, yardsticks, tape measures, measuring cups, unit blocks, foot steps or themed units, and graphing the measurements to compare. Same skill set, differentiated at vastly different levels. Even this needs conditional tweaking. All the pre-k's know how to spell their last names now, so that is no longer a relevant skill activity for music and will be changed out. In another post I'll get into the curriculum components and the importance of each. For instance, how counting on Friday teaches 1-to-1 correspondence and creating method processes for counting groups of objects. CLICK PICTURES TO VIEW LARGER I use this MS Word template, available for FREE on TPT, for curriculum planning. Often, the daily skill sets above are either already incorporated, or can easily be incorporated, into the theme planning. For an example of a completed curriculum unit, check out our Owls Theme. Each monthly theme is broken down into 4 sub-themes. For instance: SPACE Astronauts & Rockets The Universe Our Solar System Aliens & Robots We also have a musical component, often classical, and an art component, often a master, and Spanish vocabulary component that we incorporate. This planning form may not include all games, file folder games, manipulatives, room-set up, etc. that I utilize. For those of you trained in curriculum creation, I do NOT do a full curriculum development for each activity. With having these children usually from infant to school-age, I keep an internal evaluation of progression and plan out only weekly learning objectives. Since I am creating the activities for my personal use, I do not need to create written procedures and evaluations. My curriculum is stored currently in file folders in a large office bookcase unit. I would like to get it into boxes so that I could have EVERY theme-related item, including dress-up, room set-up, manipulatives, etc. together for an easy pull. File boxes will most likely be the easiest, but they do take up a lot of space. In each file some of the things I probably have: Completed planning sheets All the books I own for that theme Flannel board Sentence and word walls File folder games Samples of previous crafts DVDs CDs Coloring pages Mini-book(s) Build-a-[theme item] game Curriculum creation is one of my great joys. I love the research and compilation, the creativity and excitement of bringing something fun and educational to my students. Learning is rarely linear. Children take developmental leaps, sometimes in odd directions. As a teacher, it is important that I keep each one challenged without pushing or inhibiting their growth, and that takes constant evaluation and a good eye for when those leaps happen so that we can move on to a higher level of instruction. When we do an activity, I constantly question if they WANT to do another round, another activity, and I usually cut them off while they are still engaged. I want them wanting more, and they will usually ask if they can continue. One of the most important desires and abilities I can instill in them is that of self-directed learning. So as they choose to go off with their rulers after we've spent several minutes doing a measuring activity, conferring between themselves as to procedures and what to measure next, I step back and let them. They know I am here as a resource, rather than an intrusive director. It is my job to ensure that when I invite my students to learn, they glow with excitement and anticipation of a fun, interactive, playful time. The results, so far, have been astounding. A few of my complete curriculum units are available through my TPT store. Apples Dental Ice Cream Penguins Rainbows St. Patrick's Day Valentine's Follow Connie -'s board Classroom on Pinterest. Tags: preschool, child care, pre-k, curriculum, development, teaching, education, homeschooling, homeschool, home, school, preschool curriculum development, planning

I love teaching all algebra topics with tons of interactive and collaborative activities that get students thinking independently and working together. This way everyone gets the practice they need to feel confident in algebra. Here are a bunch of slope activities that you can assign to students working in group or even digitally. I have updated many of the activities to now include links to interactive digital slope activities in Google Slides and Google Forms for blended learning.

Step into nature for some fresh air and learn how to identify trees by their leaves with these three simple visual charts.

Are you on Spring Break or are you back at it today?? You may remember this lil freebie from my post last year. But in case you didn't grab it then, it's available to you on my blog today. Hop over and grab it! Hope you and your kiddos enjoy!

Ohhhhhhh my goodness! This might be my favorite new project! You've probably seen this or a similar Banyan Tree project in Dynamic Art Projects for Children, or maybe another blog. But I'm going to post it anyway because it is just that fabulous! Banyan trees grow primarily in India, though you can find some in Florida as well. From its branches grow aerial roots, which stretch downward and plant themselves back into the ground. They're amazing to look at! source source My fifth graders worked with oil pastels on their Wayne Thiebaud-inspired cakes project and really loved them. I think I significantly facilitated the sale of oil pastels at the local arts and crafts stores with that project. This project upped the oil pastel ante, as kiddos had to use their previous experience with the medium and further their technique in the form of blending colors. To begin, I walked the students through the tree-drawing process. Despite giving each class essentially the same spiel, every tree was very different. I love that about art, don't you? After drawing, kiddos painted their tree trunks and branches with black tempera paint. All that jazz took at least one full 45-minute class; some kiddos had to finish painting at the start of the next class. As far as coloring goes, most of my fifth graders used up two classes' worth of time (90 minutes total) to color. Every section had to include two analogous or like colors blended together. Some students went the random route, while others chose a specific color scheme or order. For the bottoms of the artwork, more colors could be used. Some students 'planted' their tree in water, which allowed for a reflection. I highly recommend using the reflective format, as the results are totally stunning! (The photos do NOT do these projects any justice. The vibrancy of the colors will knock your socks off in person!) This sweet kiddo lacks a lot of fine motor skills... yet this project was her JAM! This one is nicer than my example... it's humbling to be outdone by an 11-year-old! I'll do this project again and again--the kids loved it, they learned a lot, and WOW, are these babies gorgeous! Also, two nights ago I watched "Life of Pi," and there's a Banyan tree in one scene! I'm 28 years old and that alone made me so excited that I accidentally woke up the dog... and my husband. Whoops.

A1 vocabulary worksheet on about family and saxon genitive. Key provided.Here you are more about families:https://en.islcollective.com/mypage/my-creations?search_key=family&type=printables&option=published&id=620769&grammar=&vocabulary=&materials=&levels=&studentTypes=&skills=&languageExams=&dialect=&functions=&page=1&sorting_type=most_newest&filter_type=filter_all&view_type=list&view_length=12 - ESL worksheets

I was strolling the aisles of the Dollar Tree the other week and came across this super adorable frog fly swatter! That was just enough motivation to pull out the fly swatting activities! Of course, any old fly swatter will do, but geez…. he’s just so cute! Many of my kindergarten friends are just learning […]

Finger painting is not something we do often in my classroom. Why, you ask? No, you probably do not ask why! :) Painting can be messy enough even with a paintbrush! But this past week, the children were given the opportunity to finger paint some fall trees and the results were pretty great. Each tree was very unique, just like the artists who painted them! Take a peek at the results on my blog post. While you're there, you may want to download a free tree printable for your own painting project (you can use the tree image as a template or just paint right on the page)... You can also pick up a free tree/seasons printable that features a tree for each season. Just click {here} to grab a set!

The Empowered Educator - Children's Cardboard X-ray 'Tablet'

We read Deanna Jump's Who Took the Apples from the Apple Tree?. As a response of our Friday, we made our own version of the story. Students illustrated their self and wrote their name. I kept the ending a surprise until we finished our book and read it aloud. The students loved the surprise ending!

Identify trees by the color and surface of their barks! Learn how to do a tree bark rubbing and download a free poster with matching game!

Here’s a fun science experiment that will definitely get a “wow” from the kids. Combine baking soda and vinegar to make sodium acetate, or hot ice! It crystalizes instantly when you pour it, allowing you to create a tower of crystals. Since the process of crystallization is exothermic, the “ice” that forms will be hot […]

Great news! We've created a series of free, easy to use anxiety resources to help parents, teachers and loves ones get kids talking about their worries.

Learning about landforms can be a lot of fun and a great addition to an Earth Science or Geography study. We found some amazing free resources to use when studying landforms that we think you will love using with your homeschoolers.

These scrolls start with a chalk pastel blended background and india ink branches blown out with a straw. Students then used Craypas to create their blossoms and used a small red foam square to create their signature seal. (I wanted to purchase a real signature seal but could not find one so instead I created a seal using an exacto blade and an old pink eraser!) Some classes ended up with extra time so we drew "Stillwater"the panda from the book "Zen Shorts" by Jon Muth. For displaying these lovely projects, I used hot glue to attach popsicle sticks together to ack like a dowel on the top, and glued a single popsicle stick to the bottom to give the scroll a bottom weight. A small red string to hang was the finishing touch.

Have you ever wondered how to draw 3-dimensional letters that look like solid structures? Well then your answer is to use the laws of perspective. We will show you, in an easy way, how to draw 3d letters with one point perspective. Find out how to draw these neat letters now.

It was about this time last year I took my third graders outside for a paper airplane competition. We had spent a half hour working in te...

The Fall Preschool Unit is packed full of hands on math & literacy activities as well as no prep worksheets for easy lesson planning.

Time for a Trip to the Zoo!!! Going to the zoo is my favorite field trip to take with primary grade students. When I taught Kindergar...

Kids can make their own unique pop-up park complete with swing set, slide, and critter-filled trees with this cute 1st grade arts and crafts printable.

All About Me Preschool activities encourage kids towards self-discovery. Here are over 20activities to try with your preschoolers.

People have lost the genuine connection with nature and our basic instinct to grow food due to industrialisation…

Set of FREE printable world map choices with blank maps and labeled options for learning geography, countries, capitals, famous landmarks