Back to School!

My summer fun has just begun! I’ve been on holidays for about a week now but I’ve already been reading posts from other bloggers about how they are heading back to school in a couple weeks! I can’t believe how fast summer seems to go and it doesn’t help that I tend to spend most of my summer planning for September and Back to School.

I’m linking up with the fabulous Erin, A.K.A. Mrs. Beattie, for her Back to School linky!

One of my favourite things to do over the summer is get my classroom website all ready for the first week of school.  This year I am switching from a wiki site to a wordpress blog so I need to figure out the ins and outs of wordpress.

One of the things I always add to my site is a fun video that I show to the kids on the first day or week of school and then I post it to the site so parents can watch too or kids can rewatch at home. They get so excited to share their learning with their parents this way.

Here is a video I created a couple years ago using an awesome site called Xtranormal:

First day of school jitters
by: heidihoneighbour

I made this to use with my grades 3-5 students but now I am teaching a 1/2 split class and I will be redoing this video.

I’m also happy to say that I finished my Back to School Activity Bundle! It’s a mixture of literacy and math activities as well as forms for the first week of school that I’ve developed and used in my classroom over the last several years.  The literacy and math activities are really geared for grades one and two but the other forms and get to know you activities can be used in just about any grade.

Here are some activity ideas from this bundle:

I read my students The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown during the first week and then we complete our own “Important Book” about the first week of school using my template.

Here is a link to The Important Book:

I also like to do some simple math and literacy diagnostics during that first week.  It helps me get an idea of where my kids starting points will be.  Here are a couple images of my diagnostic pages that are included in my Back to School Bundle:

I also like to have the students create an, “All About Me”  poster on the first day and then we display for our Open House/Meet the Teacher night.  I save these posters in their portfolios until the last day of school so they can see how far their work has come.

I hope you were able to get some great ideas for back to school.  Check out Erin’s Blog for some other great back to school ideas! If you have some of your own ideas you can link up as well.