Getting Ready

My husband and son are away for the week and it is giving me PLENTY of time to catch up on blogging !!! Is it bad that I love them being gone for a bit? No extra dishes, dirty towels, and I can watch what I want to on TV.

For this post I thought I would share with you 2 things that I always do with my class at the beginning of the year.

The first thing I do when I finally get my class (usually not until day 3 or 4 of school) is to create name tags for their desks. These are super helpful when we have a TTOC (substitute teacher) or guest speaker in the classroom.

I take a 8.5 x 11 piece of cardstock and cut it length wise.

I write students’ names in the middle and draw the bubble around it. In the past I have let students do all the work but I find that sometimes it is hard to read their names. The only thing that is allowed in the bubble is one solid, light color. Too much design here will make it difficult to read the name.

Students are free to design outside the bubble anyway they like. I then laminate them and they get taped on the front part of students desks. This keeps it off the top of their desk where it may get in the way of their work.

I am always amazed at how much work my students put into their nametag. Two of my students that I taught for the last 2 years said they took theirs home and hung it on their bedroom door 🙂

The second thing I always do with students is I play Back to School Bingo (click here to get it) with them. Like I mentioned above, we don’t get our actually students until the end of the first week. This is a way of not having to shuffle kids from class to class as we figure out who has shown up at the school.

Since this is how things go we have to find activities to fill time with the kids we have. Usually they are a mix of students from Grades 1-7.

Everyone loves winning things and my Back to School Bingo is perfect for this since there are 30 different cards that can be used ! I am not a big promoter of handing out candy (don’t get me wrong I will give it out but not all the time) so instead I give out fancy pencils, erasers, rulers, notebooks, staplers, and any other fun school supplies I find for CHEAP.

Sometimes I think the students are more excited to get these novelty items than they are to get a piece of candy.

If you teach French, I also have the Bingo game in French here.

I am super excited about going back to school and meeting my new students but in the meantime I am going to go watch what I want on TV !!!

Cheers,