Teacher Troubles: What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Hey Teacher Friends!

We want to reach out and ask you what your most plaguing thoughts and questions are on a daily basis.  As we have expressed, our goal is to give you fun resources that target multiple modalities so you can have successful learners in the classroom.  One thing we would like to know is what pitfalls are preventing you from feeling your kiddos are succeeding?  We are here for you and want to provide you with as many opportunities and resources as possible.  Comment below to share your woes and then subscribe for follow ups to your burning questions :)

Sensory Fun for All

Hello out there teacher friends!

This post is all about sensory today.  I wasn't really even familiar with the concept until I entered the early childhood field, but I think it's benefits extend to older children.  The act of playing in and manipulating the material stimulates the child, opening his or her mind to the learning task at hand.

Alphabet Sensory

You can differentiate this activity all the way up through 2nd or 3rd grade by incorporating sight words, spelling words, vocabulary words, etc.

Here's an awesome twist to the above idea.  Same concept, different process: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/178666310193234538/

Sensory Bottles

These can be used for a Science center to help children explore their environment, or as a calming tool for behavior issues in the classroom.  You can even have the kids make their own as an art project.  Children can make bottles with different habitats or a rainbow of colors for Science.  You can have bottles for big/small, short/long, shapes, etc. for Math.  There are tons of things you can do and they look really cool!

A simpler version of this is sensory bags: http://www.growingajeweledrose.com/p/baby-play.html

Magnetic Sensory

This is a great idea for a magnetic unit.  You can add Math to the mix by having the kiddos sort the different tools.

Here's another way to take sensory to the next level: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/76490893646534111/

Hopefully this sheds some light on how sensory can be useful not just for early childhood, but for elementary ages as well.  Feel free to share your own personal experiences or ideas for how to bring these valuable tools into the classroom!

Back to School SALE!! Part 2 and a Giveaway!

Ok TpT fans,

We are having another Back to School SALE for those of you that didn't stock up enough during the first one at the beginning of the month.  This sale is ONE DAY ONLY so make sure you save the date!  We will be debuting our newly revised Word of the Day September and October calendars complete with Cut&Paste student calendars.  Here's a preview:

These calendars are designed to be more interactive for your students.  You can choose to have students write the number or simply use the sheet with pretyped numbers.  Students can also color the appropriate pattern for each day.    Here are a couple of comments from our buyers:

"It is a great way to add fun and learning right to our calendar time! Best part is no extra work for me. It was a great purchase!"
And:"Such a great resource. It has really served to grow my students vocabulary and they are using it now in their writing. Thanks so much!"


As another special bonus, we have completely redesigned our October calendar.  It's much prettier now:

Just click on the picture below to purchase:

We have other Word of the Day Products that you can check on by clicking on the picture below:

In addition, we are revising our Community Helpers bundle so that all the no prep sheets are in black and white!

Before

After

Make sure y'all go over to our new collaborative blog and enter to win a Target Gift Card on Aug.19!  We are giving more prizes away so 

check back there to enter.

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6442445283067840503#editor/target=post;postID=4738360667086981900;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=12;src=link

Lastly, stay tuned for some exciting news regarding our Word of the Day products.  We will be releasing something brand new very soon that will enhance vocabulary building in your classroom.  Be one of the first 5 people to share this blog post on Twitter or Facebook or instagram and you will get this new product FREE!!  Just comment below to let us know where you shared it. 

Thanks everyone,

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!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

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!