Engaging Classroom Ideas for Elementary Teachers to Welcome the Fall Season

 As the crisp autumn air settles in and leaves paint the landscape with vibrant colors, it's time to embrace the season of fall in our elementary classrooms. Fall brings forth a renewed sense of energy and excitement, making it the perfect opportunity for teachers to introduce engaging activities that capture students' attention and foster a love for learning. In this blog post, we will explore a collection of classroom ideas designed to keep elementary students actively engaged during the fall season.

     Create a cozy reading corner in your classroom that reflects the essence of fall. Set up a bookshelf filled with autumn-themed books, such as stories about changing leaves, harvest festivals, and seasonal animals. Decorate the reading area with fall leaves, pumpkin-shaped cushions, and warm-colored blankets. Encourage students to explore these books during independent reading time, and consider organizing read-aloud sessions where you can share some of these fall tales.

     Integrate math into the fall season by incorporating hands-on activities related to harvesting. Set up a pretend farm stand where students can practice counting, addition, and subtraction by buying and selling fruits and vegetables. Use plastic fruits and vegetables or create them from paper to create a visual representation of the goods. This activity not only enhances students' mathematical skills but also teaches them about the importance of agriculture and healthy eating. Another fun hands-on activity is investigating pumpkins. My students love learning about the different sizes and amounts of seeds in the different pumpkins.  Including fun fall themes on your math worksheets is always fun as well. 

     Get your students' creative juices flowing with fall-inspired art and craft projects. Incorporate activities such as leaf printing, where students can create beautiful leaf patterns using real leaves dipped in paint. Alternatively, they can make fall-themed collages using materials like tissue paper, construction paper, and dried leaves. Display their artwork around the classroom to celebrate their creativity and foster a sense of pride in their accomplishments.

     Harness the beauty and uniqueness of fall to inspire your students' writing skills. Provide them with seasonal writing prompts, such as describing their favorite fall memory, crafting a story based on the adventures of a magical scarecrow, or composing a poem about the changing colors of leaves. Bringing in Science based writing is always fun too. Students can learn about the steps to grow a pumpkin or sunflower and then write about it.  Encourage creativity, imagination, and the use of descriptive language. You can also incorporate technology by having students create digital stories or blog posts about their fall experiences.

     Incorporate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) into fall-themed challenges that promote critical thinking and problem-solving. Task students with designing and building a scarecrow that can withstand strong winds or constructing a pumpkin launcher using simple machines. Encourage teamwork and provide materials like craft sticks, rubber bands, tape, and recycled materials. These hands-on activities will excite and engage students while enhancing their STEM skills.

     Fall is a season rich in cultural celebrations, such as Halloween, Diwali, and Thanksgiving. Take this opportunity to teach your students about these festivals by organizing multicultural events. Invite guest speakers or parents from different backgrounds to share their traditions and customs. Encourage students to create artwork, prepare traditional foods, or participate in costume parades that celebrate the diversity of cultures represented in your classroom.

     As the fall season arrives, elementary teachers have a fantastic opportunity to infuse their classrooms with engaging activities that keep students excited about learning. By incorporating fall-themed reading, math, science, art, writing, STEM challenges, and cultural celebrations, educators can create a vibrant and stimulating learning environment. Embrace the spirit of fall, and watch your students' engagement and enthusiasm soar throughout the season. Happy teaching!

5 Fresh Spring Ideas to Keep Your Students Engaged

  Springtime is in the air and the end of the year is coming quickly. Are your students having a hard time staying engaged in their learning? Today I am going to talk about all things spring and helping to keep your students engaged during this challenging time of the year. 

    Spring is a great time to review skills that your students have been learning all year and one fun way to do that is with math crafts. Students love these activities and they don’t even realize they are reviewing skills they have learned. These types of crafts also make great decorations around the room. Teachers love having these projects for open house to help showcase all the skills their students have been learning. One of the favorite projects in my classroom is the flower telling time. Students love to create their flowers and show off what they have learned about telling time. This is also a great project for beginning telling time or it can even get more advanced with telling time to the minute. 

    Another activity that my students love is digital task cards. Task cards are low prep and allow students to practice the skills that they are working on. You can create digital task cards in google slides and then you can easily assign them through google classroom or whatever school management system you have. There are also a lot of different activities you can set up for your students with task cards. You can have them just straight answer the questions. You can set up the questions on google forms and make it like a digital escape room. You can have students scoot around the room to different questions and have them record their answers on their own papers. There are lots of different things that you can do with digital task cards. 

    Along the same lines as the math crafts, students love showcasing their writing with fun crafts. One project that is always a hit in my classroom is insect stories. Students create their own insect and create a story to go along with it. Another project that is always a big hit is the rainbow poems. April is National Poetry month, so this is a great project to celebrate this special month. Students love showing off what spring items are the different colors of the rainbow. 

My 5 Easy Steps To A Smooth Writers Workshop Block

Writing is an important skill that our students need to learn, and should be a part of our daily schedule each week. It is amazing to see the improvement of our students’ writing when we are including it as part of our daily schedule. You can have your students write daily with just a few simple steps and systems. 

     One of the most important parts of Writers Workshop is the mini-lesson. I like to use concepts that I see my students having a hard time with and then incorporate that into a mini-lesson. The mini-lesson can be a grammar skill you see a lot of your students struggling with, or it can be a writing skill like word choice or sentence types that your students have trouble with. The mini-lesson should not be more than 10 - 15 minutes. We don’t want to have our students sitting there for a long time, instead, we want to get them to their writing. 

     

     The next step in running an excellent Writers Workshop block is mentor texts. Bringing in books that focus on different skills as writers is a great way to help students understand what they should add to their own writing. I like to start each new unit with a couple books that fall in that genre of writing. There are so many great books out there that go along with each of the different genres of writing that we teach. I usually display the books on the smart board so all my students can see the pages as we are reading. This also makes for a great way to discuss the books and ideas to add to their writing because all of the students can see the pages. 

     I use lots of graphic organizers during our Writers Workshop block. Graphic organizers are great because you can reuse the same organizers for the whole writing unit. This allows your students to get used to the organizers that are being used. This also makes it so I can reuse the organizers year after year. Just make the tweaks you need to make for each new year. Graphic organizers make my life so much easier and after the first few weeks of school, the students know exactly what to do with each organizer and how to use them. When my students need to add more pages to their writing they just go and grab the organizer that they need. Some students will only use one or two organizers, and some will use a lot more. Using graphic organizers makes it easy for my students to transfer their work to regular paper. As they finish their writing, they meet with me for a conference to go over it and make sure they are ready for the next step.  I love the functionality of graphic organizers, and my students love them too!

    The next part of a smooth Writers Workshop block is publishing. Once the students are done with their writing and they have met with me to go over it, they are ready to publish. The publishing process can be done in a couple of different ways. Some teachers really like their students to hand write everything out on paper. Other teachers like to make everything digital. I like to do a hybrid of the two. After the conference with me, my students get a publishing paper and write their piece on the paper. Just like the graphic organizers, I always have plenty of extras out for my students so they can just grab what they need on their own. Once they have written out their published piece on paper, they then type it on the computer. I have them use Google Docs to do this. I create an assignment in Google classroom and then they are able to type their piece. I like to have them type it also because they need the practice with typing for state testing. The more opportunities we can give them to type, the better. Also, when they type their work, all of their published pieces are organized and in their Google Drive and this makes it easy to add work to their digital portfolios. 

     The last part of running a smooth Writers Workshop block is the organization. I like to keep these paper trays from Lakeshore Learning around the room. I have a spot in the classroom for all our writing materials. I l keep our graphic organizers, rough draft paper, and publishing paper in the boxes. Once the students learn how to use the different papers and where to find them, it makes our writing time run so smoothly. Students just get up, grab what they need, and then return to their seats. Having the supplies organized is so important. I love being able to help my students become independent learners. 

     With just a few simple steps you can have your students writing every day. Your Writers Workshop will be so organized that you can run your sessions in a snap. Your students will become better writers and be begging for writing time. What step in the Writers Workshop block are you most excited to try in your classroom? Tell me in the comments! 

6 of my top tips for Creating a Digital Classroom with Google Apps

  Technology is more and more popular in classrooms, but teachers don’t always know how to bring more technology into their classrooms. Today I am going to show you how you can easily bring more technology into your classroom and make your students excited about learning!

     The first thing I encourage teachers to implement is Google Classroom. This app makes it easy to create a virtual classroom and invite your students in. Once your students are in your class, you can easily create assignments for them. You are able to see what work your students have and haven't completed. You can also grade their work in the app and return it to them. Parents can also view their child’s work and see what has been completed and what work still needs to be turned in. Google Classroom allows teachers to seamlessly assign, collect, and grade work. 

     The next app on the list is Google Docs. This an excellent app to allow students to create all the different writing assignments they have. In my classroom, I have students publish all of their writing throughout the year on Google Docs. This keeps a record of their work and it also allows them to work on their typing skills using real world applications rather than just typing on a typing program. Publishing on Google Docs gives students a reason to be typing, and they are working on those typing skills and don’t even realize it! There is so much typing now on the state tests and students need to be given opportunities to practice their typing skills. Another thing I love about all of the Google apps, but especially Google Docs, is that students can work together on one document from their own devices. As students are typing they will each have their own cursor with a different color. As a teacher, it is also great to be able to see revision history so you can see what students were typing and what they deleted. Google Docs can also show you if the student typed up the document word by word, or if they just copied and pasted the entire document. 

     The next Google app on the list is Google Forms. This is a great app that lets you collect data from your students. One way that I did this in my classroom was to do check ins with my students. Each morning, as part of our morning routine, the students would fill out the Google Form to let me know how they were doing. All of the data from the form automatically goes into the spreadsheet, which makes it easy to see the data from the Form. Google Forms also allows you to create quizzes for your students. They can even be self correcting so your students know right away how they did. The quizzes feature can be used for practice, quizzes, and tests. Google Forms can also be used to collect data from parents. I love to use a Google Form when I need to collect information from parents! A perfect time to do this is at the start of the school year when you need to collect all of that important information about families and students. 

 

     The next app on the list is Google Slides. This app is wonderful for presentations! I love to have my students use slides to create presentations for different topics we are studying. I enjoy seeing their creativity with pictures and writing on the slides. The students love to then share what they learned and created with their classmates. Google Slides are also a great way to have students practice different ELA and Math skills. You can create a document in Power Point and then save them as photos. The photos can then be put in the background of the Google Slides so students can type on top of it. When the pictures are set as the background, students are not able to delete the content that you as the teacher created in the photo. 

     Next on the list is Google Sites. This app allows you to create a website through the Google Chrome platform. I love to use this as a website for my families! This is the hub of our classroom, and parents or students can always come to this site when they have questions about our class or need to find a detail about something. I have my site published for the public so my families can get to it without being on our school network. I also have a link to it in my email signature so parents can quickly find it. The other thing I love to use Google Sites for is student portfolios. Because students are doing so much work through Google apps, it's easy for them to connect their work to the site. At the start of the year, the students create sections on the site for each subject we do in class. Students then add the work they are proud of to the different sections. As students get older, they can add to the portfolios each year. When they are ready to graduate they have a record of all their work throughout the years. For their portfolios, I leave them as private so only people in our school network can view them. Students can use these portfolios to talk to their parents about their learning at our student led conferences. 

     The last Google app on the list is probably the most important of all the apps. Finally, we are going to talk about Google Drive. Drive is where all of your documents are housed. When you create a document in any of the apps, Google puts it in your Drive. You can also upload any documents to your Drive to keep a backup copy for you. One thing I love about Drive is that when you use Google Classroom and you create an assignment, Drive automatically creates a folder for you to keep all your students' work. The students have a copy in their Drive, and a copy is also made for your Drive. No more losing work for your students! There is always a copy for you. 

     Google apps are a great way to create a digital classroom. Google apps allows you to organize your students work and helps you to organize parent information as well. Google has made it so eady for educators. What Google app are you going to try first? 

My Top 5 Picture Books to Celebrate Summer

    Picture books are one of my favorite ways to celebrate a holiday or season. Summer is one of my favorite times of the year and today I am going to talk about my favorite books to help celebrate summer!

    The first book on my list is "A Camping Spree with Mr. Magee." This is such a fun book and always has my students laughing out loud. This is a super fun book to kick off summer, or to read during a camping day in your classroom. 

    Ice cream is a staple for summer. I love a good scoop of ice cream and summer is my favorite time of year to eat it. "Ice Cream" by Gail Gibbons is one of my favorite books by this great author. This book goes into great detail all about ice cream and how it is made. This would be a fun book to include as part of an ice cream day in your classroom. Use the book to have students write about ice cream and what they learned from the book. How fun would it be to end the day with your students making their own ice cream sundaes? 

    Another summer staple is star gazing and visiting our Nation's National Parks. The book "Our Great Big Backyard" by our former first lady Laura Bush and her daughter Jenna Bush Hager is another favorite book. This book shares all about National Parks and what wonderful places they are to visit. I love using this book during our end of the year camping week. After using this book, my students also loved researching different national parks and sharing what they learned with their classmates. 

    This is a great book that celebrates the season of summer. It shares all the things that you can do during this fun season. I love having my students create their own bucket list for their summer. This book is always a great way to introduce that activity. 

    The last book on my favorite summer books list is "S is for S’mores: A Camping Alphabet." This series of books is one of my favorites to read to my class. These books are available on all different topics. This particular book is all about summer and camping. This is another great book to have as part of your camping week theme in your classroom. One activity that I love to have my students do with this book is create their own summer alphabet books. They really enjoy coming up with their own themes that go along with summer and creating their own books. They also love to share their books with the rest of the class. 

    Summer is such a great time to share the love of reading with your students. What are some of your favorite books to share about summer? Do you have any favorite activities to do with your favorite books? I can’t wait to hear all about them!