Bloglovin'

For those of you who see that you can follow us on Bloglovin' and don't know what it is, we thought we'd share a little bit about the site.  It functions similarly to Pinterest, Facebook, and other social media that create a "newsfeed" based on the different blogs you're connected to.  When your favorite blogs have a new post, you see it right away in your news feed.  This way, when we have special offers, sales, giveaways, etc, you know about them immediately.  Happy reading!

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Back to School SALE!

Well I am excited to tell y'all that our entire store is on sale Aug.3-5!

Remember to use the promo code Aug.3-4 to get the extra percentage off. Remember to also cash in your TPT credits for making all those nice comments on products. 

We wanted to show you a few of our back to school resources.

We have revised our August and September calendars to include more interactive student calendars. Your kiddos will enjoy cutting out each calendar piece to match the group calendars. Click on Covers to see more.

Here is a sample of the calendar pieces. 

This is a fun game that assesses their knowledge of the August vocabulary.

Here is our September Calendar with our fun classroom mascot Quality Quentin. If you want to read more about Quentin and how he helps us to be quality students: Click here:
http://soltrainlearning.blogspot.com/2015/07/back-to-school-activities-freebies-and.html

We write about our calendar word every day in our calendar journals. My kiddos love to share what they write.

This is the word bounce game for September:

Here are some of the cards you get.

My kiddos love playing this game and my ELL teacher who is leading the game, said this was great for her students because they are learning about basic vocabulary in fun ways.

 Sometimes we tape the cards around the room and let them walk around the room and record their answers. Here my wonderful ELL teacher is helping one of her students read a card.

This is another word of the day resource that we just added for August and  September.

This is a sample from our December cut and glue activities. This student decided to decorate her trees. I also love to look at their illustrations.

We also added  new Word Crumbs.

This is our December Word Crumbs. My kiddos love to use little magnifying glasses and pretend to be word detectives:)

We also have have a fun Back to School Math Bounce Game: This is a great way to assess what your kiddos already know or use it as a review of skills.

This is our newest Scoot Game and it is great for back to school with fun apple shaped cards and apple manipulatives!  It would also make a great math center using the apple manipulatives to help the kiddos with adding or you could use the apples for making patterns or graphing. It would be fun to use this during your unit on apples.

We also have  our great word of the day products bundled together at a discount so you can get them for the whole year in one pack. They are featured in our store! Your kiddos will be introduced to a new word each day. There is a teacher guide for our calendars. They really help writing skills because they help to keep the kids on topic:)

"My class LOVES their journals. This is such a great resource and is saving me so much time!!!! Thanks!" was said in comments for our calendars:)

We have many fun scoot games, bundles, social studies and science units with our original upbeat songs and more so check us out:)

Come back next week and learn how to make a quality student. It is a fun craft for your kiddos:)

We love comments on what y'all would like to see in our store or what you would like us to post on our blog!

Happy Shopping!

Back to School Activities, FREEBIES and a GIVEAWAY!

MEET OUR CLASSROOM MASCOT- Quentin the Quality Penguin!  Isn't he cute:) He helps my kiddos to be "quality" students. He also loves to sing, "Quality Students" with us.

 I start the year with this display of Quality Quentin and his friend Mandy on my wall outside of my classroom and they are greeted by Quality Quentin when they enter the classroom. One of my sweet little girls made him the bracelet he is wearing.  Then I take pictures of my kiddos standing on little glaciers for our classroom display.

 I read Quentin's First Day.  It is a book about how scared Quentin is to go to school.  Mama Penguin makes him feel better by teaching him the Quality Student song, so he knows how to behave at school.  You can get the book in our store. Just click on the picture to purchase.

Then we sing the Quality Student Song and act out the letters of "Quality"  This song is included with the book. You can also grab just the song for FREE:)

 After we have read the book and sung our Quality Student song, we will pass around Quality Quentin and each of the kiddos will say their name and what a quality student is.
"My name is Jon, and a quality student listens to the teacher."  We have these class meetings every day the first few weeks of school and then we will have them weekly.  My students really learn how a quality student acts.

I also talk to them about how they can earn these Quentin Dollars when they are Quality Students.  They also can lose them if they are not being quality students.  They get to go to the store when they earn 10 and they can save up 20 to get larger items.  The cool thing about this is they are learning about saving money to purchase something bigger.  I also had students to use their dollars to buy gifts for family members.  One little girl even asked about getting something for her brother's birthday but didn't have enough dollars, so I loaned them to her and was able to give her a mini lesson on loaning money from a bank.  It was great! And she was so proud and happy to be giving her brother a present that she felt like she earned.  I use these dollars now as my behavior system because it is so much easier and it takes away the pressure from the kiddos when they were changing their signs.  It is a free download in our store.  I just run them off in grayscale.

 I also use this as a class incentive.  We will vote on an activity that the class wants to do and when we get enough Quentins on the igloo, we will do the activity.  The kiddos love seeing the number of Quentins grow.  You can get these in our Back to School Bundle.  

 The parents are very good about helping me with donating items for our little store.  I just ask for parents who can to sign up at the beginning of the year to donate.

 As you can see, they love the Quentin Dollars! 

This is our Back to School Unit that has literacy activities that will also encourage your kiddos to be quality students.  Y'all can get this and everything in our store for 20% off during the big Back to School SALE Aug.3-4

This is a book that the kiddos can illustrate themselves.    I just love their own pictures!  it makes each book unique:)






Here are a few more examples of what you will get in this large literacy  unit- over 90 pages! The kiddos love seeing Quentin and Mandy on these resources:)

These are quality student crowns that we make using a color code. They love wearing them!

We create this class big book after we have discussed what a quality student is over a few weeks.

This one was done by one of my ELL students who said that he was dancing to the Quality Student song:)

Well that is what we do to start our year off learning about being a quality student!

What are some of the things y'all do? We would love to hear about some of your ideas!

And now your chance to win a $45 TPT card!

GIVEAWAY! Back to school is almost here, and so is the TPT site wide sale! Some friends and I have gotten together to celebrate and give away some gift cards to TPT that you can use during the upcoming sale, August 3-4! To enter for your chance to win a $45 TPT gift card simply go here: http://gvwy.io/xr1spp4

Giveaways run Thursday- Saturday with the winners announced Sunday!
To enter THREE MORE $45 gift card giveaways, click on these links below:
http://gvwy.io/s9680ch
http://gvwy.io/b0lj1c
http://gvwy.io/mk685ki
Good luck!

Hope your school year is awesome!