Back to School Bus Bulletin Board

Back to School Bus- 1It’s always helpful to get to know your students at the beginning of the year. Here’s one bulletin board idea that will help each student express themselves and be a part of the classroom. First, have the students make their bus (using the directions in this post and printed on the page below the bus).

Click here for the free printable: Back To School Bus Bulletin Board

Decorate your bus according to these directions:

  1. Draw each member of your family inside the bus. Make sure to draw yourself in the first window. You may need to put more than one family member in a window if your family is large.  Use colors to decorate the people.
  2. Write your name inside the stripe in the middle of the bus.
  3. Draw each of the following things in the bottom section of the bus:
    1. Your favorite food
    2. Your favorite school subject
    3. Your favorite thing to do outside of school
    4. What you want to be when you grow up
  4. If you prefer ice cream instead of cake, draw stripes in the wheels. If you prefer cake instead of ice cream, draw dots in the wheels. Use your favorite color.
  5. Color in the top section of the bus (above the stripe and around the windows) using your favorite color.

Once all the students finish, have each student present their bus to the rest of the class. If your class is large, limit each student to 1 minute to share or allow students to only share their bus with those near them. Then put each bus up on a bulletin board and call it something clever (“Mrs. Smith’s Superstar Fleet”, “Travelling Down the Road to Success”, or something…).

Paint A Pony Craft

My I posted my paint a pig craft, many of my readers asked for more crafts like this. Since My Little Pony is so popular these days, I made a Paint a Pony craft. So here it is! First I found a free coloring page of a horse. Here’s one if you don’t have time to hunt for one. Then decorate your pony (feel free to add a horn to make it a unicorn!). Glue it to some construction paper and decorate the scene for your pony. This craft was a huge hit with my kindergarten girls; many of them wanted to do more than one! 

 

make your own pony 1 make your own pony 2 make your own pony 3

Teacher Memes/Cartoons – 14

Clothes Pin Voting

 EPSON MFP imageMany teachers are required to take a lunch count in the morning.  This can be a headache. Here’s an idea that will help save you time and energy. Assign each student a clothes pin (put their name or student number on both sides). Then print off this clothes pin voting board PDF (best on card stock or heavy paper), cut it out and laminate it.

Place this page somewhere in your room where kids can place their vote each day. Since the sheet is laminated, you can use a whiteboard marker to write each day’s options at the top. If choices are repeated often, some teachers may prefer to make a little card for each option and laminate it for re-use. You can attach these little cards to the voting board with a paper clip.

Instruct students to fill the board with clothes pins from the TOP FIRST. This way, it will be very easy for you to use the numbers on the board to get the total for each option.

This board can also be used for a variety of voting/graphing activities.

Paint A Pig (Craft Project)

Paint a pig printableHere’s a fun, easy craft project that’s simple enough that my kindergarten kids figured it out with hardly any help. Each kid decorated their pig however they wanted. Then they told each other a story about how the pig came to look the way it looked. The stories got pretty wild (which is the fun part). You could even go on to focus on adjectives that describe the pig, nouns the pig likes, write a story about the pig, etc. Have fun!

Click here for the free printable: Paint a Pig – Printable

paint a pig 5 paint a pig 4 paint a pig 2 paint a pig 1

Here’s a fun song that goes with little piggies:

“Five Dancing Piggies”   (“Five Little Monkeys” tune)

Five little piggies dancing in the dirt,

One fell down and he got hurt.

Mama came running from across the farm

And put that piggy inside the barn…

Repeat until no piggies are left.

No more piggies dancing in the dirt,

They all fell down; they all got hurt.

Outside, no piggies can be found.

They’re all indoors, safe and sound.

Teaching Kids Healthy Eating Habits

nutritionIt’s hard to teach kids healthy eating habits, but teaching kids about health is part of most state standards. In California, for example, nutrition and physical activity is taught starting in kindergarten. But how do you do this while juggling everything else you’ve got to do as a teacher? Here are some helpful resources:

My Pyramid– Make your own individual pyramid based on your age, gender and physical activity level

Super Tracker – Sign up for a free account and track your nutrition, physical activity, set goals and look up nutritional information on all kinds of foods using the Food-Pedia.

Teacher Stuff– curricula and lesson plans on nutrition

Literature– Great list of kids books about food, physical exercise & nutrition

Free graphic organizers from Zaner-Bloser

Wow. I’m bummed I just now found this (since it only goes through May): Teacher Appreciation week at Zaner-Bloser! Here’s their free download of 42 graphic organizers! Thanks for all you do, teachers!

End of the Year Round Up

The last day of school’s kind of a bust. You can’t really do anything productive since the kids are completely wound up (and you’re probably busy packing up your classroom for the summer). So finding non-crazy (but still fun) things to do is hard. That’s why many teachers do some kind of end of the year review project where kids can capture a snapshot of the year. in a fun way. So without further ado, here’s my “end of the year round up” page:

End of the year round up