Back to School Success: Sorting Supplies

Back to school night/open house is always a zoo!  Each year I read blogs and find new ideas of what I can do.  One tip I read about on multiple blogs was to set up bins around the room for supplies.  Genius!  This saved me sooooo much time on the first day of school.  No, not all students brought their supplies that night.  No, not all students showed up that night.  But, you know what?  It saved me from 20 students rushing me on the first day when I called out to collect each supply.  It also allowed me to have a lot of that stuff already tucked away by the first day of school.  In my classroom, I have always had things be community supplies, so almost everything was able to be sorted out.

How did I do this?  I had a PowerPoint looping through with directions of what I wanted them to do and in what order.  The directions were also printed and at each table.  Parents had to sign in, find their child's spot, fill out a survey for me (look for a future post on this!), and label and sort their supplies into bins or spots in the room.  I had signs and an actual supply already in each spot to hopefully make this run smoothly (see the picture above).  It did!  Before the students arrived the first day, I had things put away and ready to roll.

Interested in doing this for the upcoming school year?  Click on the picture below to see the signs in my TpT store.  There are three separate products depending on language.  All of the versions include signs with just clip art of the supply and no words as well as both color and black and white versions.  To get them just in English, click here.  For the signs just in Spanish, click here.  If you want both the separate English and Spanish versions as well as signs in both English AND Spanish, click here.

A bonus tip: One thing I wish I had done to make things run more smoothly was make labels with student names on for their supplies.  I had Sharpies out for parents to write names on binders, folders and notebooks.  This year I plan on having labels out at each spot with the names printed on already.

Motivate Students to Read at Home with BINGO!

I was tired of my plain old reading logs with spots for the date, title of the book(s) read and parent signature.  My students were not motivated or excited.  I only had about 75% of reading logs signed daily.  The others... I was lucky if they were signed once a month.  Were the students who had their reading logs signed daily actually reading for 20 minutes?  Probably not.  I think that, for the parents, as long as their child read SOMETHING, they signed the reading log.

Then I saw a few versions of Reading BINGO.  Of course I needed something different.  Reading logs for my dual language first grade classroom have to be in both English AND Spanish (back-to-back with the same options in both languages), simple enough for firsties, and easy enough for them to accomplish all of the tasks (keeping in mind many things including lack of resources at home and a big range of reading abilities).

I created four versions of Reading BINGO in a 4x4 grid.  Parents are only supposed to sign off on one square per day.  That doesn't mean that students can't do more than one in a day, but they need to choose which box they want to mark off.  When they have the entire card filled out, they can turn it in for a prize of the teacher's choosing.

My plan is to start this with my new group right away in the fall.  Right now I have a few very eager guinea pigs testing it out.  They were so excited to be the special testers and to show me what they had done each day. My sister, who teaches in a bilingual kindergarten class of all native Spanish-speakers, started doing this with her whole class.  She said that her students are motivated and loving it too.  Starting it mid-year, she did have to answer a few questions from parents, but it has been very well received by parents and students alike.

If you want to grab these worksheets for your class, there are three options available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  You can get the Spanish only version here, the English only version here, or the bilingual bundle here.  All versions also include an editable PowerPoint template to create your own Reading BINGO.  Enjoy!

Differentiated Scrambled Sentences

When I first discovered cut and paste scrambled sentence worksheets in Spanish a year or two ago I was in LOVE. I liked the idea of reinforcing the basics of sentences like starting with a capital letter, leaving spaces between each word and ending with a period. They could even label the simple pictures that went with the sentence! I started to design my own to go along with the integrated units we were working on like seasons and organisms. All of the worksheets had the same format. Students were expected to cut out words and organize them into a sentence that made sense. Then they wrote the sentence on the line below.

What became more and more of an obvious problem was that this was not really beneficial for the lower students. First of all, they struggled to even read the words. If they couldn't read them, how could I expect them to put them in a logical order? When I worked 1:1 or in a small group to help them complete the worksheets, they often had to be reminded that the sentence needed to start with a capital letter. It just didn't work.  My students needed the activity to be differentiated.

I started making three different versions of the same worksheet.  Version 1 is for my lowest students who are really struggling.  They simply have to cut the words and glue them in order to match the sentence that is already written (made with both a regular line and ruled lines).  This is more of just a matching.  Version 2 has the students copy the sentence that is already written.  This gives them practice with handwriting, leaving spaces, starting with a capital letter and ending with a period.  Version 3 is the original version where students have to cut the words and organize them into a sentence before gluing and then writing.  These have been working much better.  I am working on a 4th even higher version now that it is nearing the middle/end of the school year.  Here are some student examples of versions 2 and 3 from my students (from the Spending & Saving Money pack found here in Spanish).

My higher student chose to go above and beyond by labeling her picture as well.  She carried this over from the beginning of the year when we really practiced labeling everything.