✿Daily Five Parent Letter

For those of you that use "The Daily Five" as your reading block time, here is a parent letter explaining what the program is all about! We include it in our back to school information the first week of school.

❀Back to School Freebies! Under the Sea!

This year we started our year with a fun "Under the Sea" unit to hook our kids for the first couple of weeks. Below are links for a bulletin board idea, a getting to know you game, a phonics game, and a math game that I used the first couple of weeks. The kids loved playing the games, and it was a great kindergarten review! Just click on each picture for the free game download!!!


To create this cute bulletin board, I put this "Officially Firsties" poster in the middle, and then printed the children's names on labels. I put the labels on the fish patterns you will find in this picture link, and then each child had a fish with their name on it on the bulletin board! Great welcome back!



I have posted this game before, but it goes with the "Under the Sea" fun!

This game is a great phonics review! The kids work in pairs to fish for letters that have the same sounds! The directions are in the link.

This game is a great math review! You can play as a whole group lesson first, and then have the students work in pairs to put the numbers in order from 1-30. Great follow up activity included too!

❀Get to Know Your Firsties!

This activity worked really well for a first day "get to know each other" game. Our back to school unit this year is "Under the Sea," so there is a fishy theme for this game! The kids sit in a circle and pass around a bucket full of topic cards. They have things on them like "favorite game" or "favorite color." I put the topics in a beach sand pail, and the kids pass the bucket around while chanting a rhyme. Then, wherever the bucket stops, that child pulls out a topic! Each child says their name and answers the topic. Click on the picture below to download this for yourself!

❀Back To School Student Information Card

Hey Everyone!

SO I work at a year round school in the Chicago Suburbs. It is a school of choice, but it is still a public school, and our first day of school is on Wednesday! I am back in full swing now getting everything ready for my classroom, so I am ready to share some helpful things with you! I am creating some back to school units, and I will share these soon. I want my new crop of cuties to test some things out before I post them. For now though, the link below is a "Student Information Card" that we pass out each year. It is really helpful to make sure you have all the information you need about each student at your finger tips! I usually put these in a tabbed binder, and then I also use this as my call log.