Presidents' Day - American Symbols Write the Room This “Write the Room” activity would be great for any literacy center. Your students will look around the room and find the pictures and write the word on their recording sheet. This activity includes 12 pictures. Feel free to print these cards onto card stock and laminate for durability. Included: - One recording sheet - Three 8 ½ x 11 picture pages *** If you plan on sharing this resource, please purchase the appropriate number of licenses.

Teach your students about the presidents of the past with these 12 engaging and informative books, perfect for this President's Day.

A blog dedicated to help teachers in preschool and kindergarten find quality, hands on educational activities for their homes and classrooms.

Engaging President’s Day activities for kids, including President’s Day crafts, Abraham Lincoln activities, ideas for patriotic math and literacy centers, and FREE George Washington printables!

Come grab Presidents Day freebies on the blog!

I've been promising this freebie all weekend so here it is! Students will write about what they would do if they were the President! I can't wait to read what they write! Graphics are from KPM Doodles! Just click the image above to download! Don't forget to take advantage of my Teacher's Notebook 30% off Presidents Day sale! It will end tonight at midnight! Note: This sale is not for the items in my Teachers Notebook Clip Art gallery, just my regular Teachers Notebook shop.

This series of posts is about finding THE best materials for the ages and stages of a new reader. Sometimes a new reader is called and emerging reader. Most often these children are kindergarten and first grade students. I am excited to share what has worked with my own son and in my 15 years of classroom experience. I used a mix of sight words, phonics readers, and “real” books written by famous authors, web sites, guided reading, and passage fluency to help my son and students become readers! I am going to discuss each of these and the best materials I have found! Passage Fluency will get them to grade level: I want to talk with you about passage fluency because I believe that this is a really great way to get your students to grade level! Have you ever stopped to think of why a student struggles with reading? Maybe you and I have had the same thought. “Everything they are ABLE to read is so boring! No wonder they don’t want to read!” What if someone came along and wrote engaging materials for young readers that really mattered in the real world? What if someone wrote informational text that was readable at an emerging level and could help the kids reach and exceed grade level? Well, I did! I was tired of the kids reading “Go Cat Go” and “The Fish in the Dish” I wrote “materials that matter”. They are not just high interest topics, but they are topics that really matter in the real world of history and science. Kinder winter material and first grade curriculum in my district starts with the ___at family, sight words (go, the, can, have, is, are, ….) and simple sentence writing using CVC words. This is great, sweet, and teaches/ reinforces reading. But what if the kids could also learn SOMETHING while learning to read? What an IDEA! Enter one of the best ways to help your readers get to grade level. You must do shared reading & passage reading otherwise known as fluency. I created curriculum that supports three of the main areas for creating readers. The single-page passages are 2-5 minute quick reads. They are meant to be introduced whole group as a “topic we are learning about this week”. The pocket chart and passages match exactly are designed to be read several times daily over a week. I use a pocket chart (SHARED READING) from the start of first grade all the way through November. Kinders should use shared reading in a pocket chart or large paper chart format for the whole year. In first grade, I write the passage onto sentence strips and use the full color photograph cards that come with the unit as picture support on the pocket chart. The picture cards are hugely important since we teach emerging readers to check the pictures to help word solve and build understanding. Kids keep the single page passage in their homework folder and at their desk to be read when they have time and when buddies come. (INDEPENDENT READING and REREADING) Each unit comes with art, a thinking map, and writing prompt with lined writing paper to help kids express their learning and creativity! (PERSONAL RESPONSE) The art is really where the children “buy in” and I always display the art on the pocket chart to build anticipation and joy! The curriculum is differentiated to have picture clues for those who need it and those who do not. Here is a sampling of the kindergarten passages. I have created a writing unit that springboards off of the fluency passage. My school is doing “Thinking Maps”, so of course I have included 1-2 thinking maps to go with each passage. Here is a part that your students will adore. I have included a few art projects to really help the kinders buy in! I have just shown you the kinder materials I have written for the last 8 weeks of kindergarten. This will help them be read for first grade. I have written an entire year of first grade materials! Re-reading is a way to become a better reader, just like shooting hoops will make you a better basketball player. But, I MUST caution you that if you are asking a child to read something multiple times then it needs to be meaningful material. I wrote passages for my kinder unit that can be read by a Running Record 4 or Level C/D, but the best part is that the material is meaningful! As a matter of fact most of it is social studies, science, and or real world based! These materials can be found in my Kinder, Fall, Winter, and Spring Units. Fall of first grade starts with “ A Cat Can” leveled at D or Running Record 4. Kinder and first grade teachers, I want you to be able to try a week for free, so that you can taste what Kinder fluency and Fall of First Grade fluency is like. A Cat Can will suit kinders in the Spring or firsties in the fall just perfectly. As they progress through the units, each week pushes the kids toward reading grade level expectations. By the end of the units they will be reaching the beyond the end of year 1st grade Running Record 16 into the 20 range which is mid year second grade. This is what I want for my “firsties”. I want them ready. I want them ahead of the game!The best part about fluency is that it’s a game. The daily objective is to just read more smoothly and understand few words more today than we were able to read yesterday! In my classroom, we read our passage together in the morning, after lunch, and we “buddy read” again it in the afternoon. Kids also bring it home for homework. As kinders you might want to just focus on getting through the passage. Each day your little one should be sounding more smooth and reading with expression. Fall fluency picks up where kindergarten leaves off. It takes your students from a Running Record4 / Level C/D on through to a Running Record 12/13. August, September, October, and November passages are included. 16 in all. Now it pains me to not write PAGES all about fluency because I love it so much. I adore it because I have seen fluency/ shared reading change “almost readers” into “high fliers” ! I actually travel all over speaking about fluency. But I have written about it a whole bunch of times. here {Spring Fluency} here {Winter Fluency} here {How to get started with fluency} here {Teaching Comprehension and Fluency} I am a fluency floozy, what can I say? I have seen it change my readers over the past 5 years. In that five years I have gained 10 more students bringing my total to 30 and had my guided reading time cut in half. What helped stand in the gap? Fluency. It’s a life saver! I have written fun classroom curriculum that has games, tools, and lesson plans as well. Click the picture below or {here} to see the Comprehension 101 unit. As a matter of fact, you can hear me talk about fluency at the SDE I Teach 1st Conference! I seriously love fluency and I kind of make everyone in the room love it too I have special mind powers, plus I’m super silly and have fun with it. If you are going to be in Vegas on July 6-10 I will be speaking Monday morning. I am ready to bring it Las Vegas style. You will be entertained and inspired to start fluency right away! Plus you can see my adorable new dress. That’s right! Every conference needs a new dress! I love speaking and meeting you and new clothes. Seriously, try fluency. It will change your non-readers into readers!

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties we celebrated Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays on their actually birthdays. Today we combine their birthday celebrations and celebrate them together. Many of you just have a one day holiday but some school district have a whole week winter break. I have put together some great resources for your classroom Presidents' Day celebrations. If you are looking for some great craft ideas for your students to make, I found a few great sites. How about this cute Patriotic Hat George or Washington Cotton Ball Paper Craft ? Just click on each picture to find lots of craft ideas and directions. If you are looking for a list of good books for Read Alouds, just click on the picture below. For lots of wonderful free resources and activities, for all grade levels, you need to check out Scholastic. Just click on the picture below. Apples4theteacher has lots of free resources including printables, worksheets, and poems. Just click on the image below. There are more good activities at Education World you can check out by clicking on the image below. There are more than 25 great free activities at Family Education that you can check out by clicking on the image below. Finally I found lots of free activities at The Teachers Corner that you can access by clicking on the image below. I finally revised and updated my Presidents' Day Packet for Grades 2-3. You will find a Word Wall, Picture/Word Cards, 3 differentiated Reading Texts about both George Washington and Abe Lincoln. There is a Presidents' Day Fact Sort or a Picture Sort for your ESL or Struggling readers. Students will find Character Traits about each presidents and find proof in their reading texts, write Informative and Opinion Pieces using any of the 6 writing prompts, and one Compare and Contrast Activity. Just click on the picture below to download the Preview file to see sample pages of all the reading and writing activities in this packet. Finally a freebie for my wonderful followers and viewers. If you click on the picture below you can download my Free Presidents Day Noun Sort. Students will sort words related to Presidents' Day into 3 categories: Proper Nouns, Plural Nouns, and Common Nouns. Hope you will leave feedback and enjoy using it in your classrooms. Looking for some great Pinterest Boards to follow? Just click HERE. Here a two you may like to follow: Follow my blog with Bloglovin Thanks for all you do to make a difference for your students. Have a great week!

(teacherspayteachers.com) If your students are like mine, they struggle with powers of 10. With this fast-paced game, students have fun practicing and mastering this tricky concept. Simply form your students into two teams and project this exciting game! The student who says the correct answer first gets the point.

Teacher-parent conferences give you an opportunity to increase communication between school and home, keep parents informed about their child's progress, and develop a plan for the student's future

Worksheets for 1st grade math, first grade math worksheets for free for the basic math topics taught in grade 1.

We find and feature creative,free teaching ideas and activitiesfor kindergarten through fifth grade.You get back alittle more time to yourself.