#tipsclassroom

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Back to School Classroom Tips!

Tip 1: Paper Mate Flair pens make taking running records a breeze. The fine line and smooth writing tip enables you to check off quickly and easily fit notes into the small margins.

Tip 2: While setting up your art or writing center, be sure to include fun and durable writing tools for students to use. Mr. Sketch Scented Gel Crayons are chunky enough for small hands and twistable to prevent breakage. They smell good too!

Tip 3 : To save time and give students more independence, keep an X-Acto Electric Stapler in the classroom. Safely teach students how to staple their own step books, center work, and other papers to be turned in without the noise and jamming issues of a regular stapler.

Tip 4: Teaching students to set learning goals is an important step toward academic achievement. Make a simple goal guy or gal using construction paper and Elmer’s Washable School Glue Sticks.

Tip 5: Use a level app on your phone to hang back to school bulletin boards. It saves a ton of time with no more climbing up and down to check that they are straight.

Tip 6: Use a simple system to display student work by gluing sprayed clothespins to a cut out. Spray lots of pins at once by clipping them onto a pizza box. Spray one side, close the lid, and spray the other side.

Tip 7: With the warm back to school temperatures, my students bring frozen water bottles to school. Cut foam craft sheets into coasters for students to place their bottles on.  No more wet desks and soppy papers.

Tip 8: Make your own thematic sticky notes with removable glue sticks. This adds an interactive element where students can add their own writing to your charts and makes it easy to reuse them year after year.

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Quick classroom and product tips from Tessa Maguire

• Wanting to print a poster with a dark background or heavy color and worried about the cost of ink?  Save money and ink by ordering heavy-color or dark posters as 8x10 pictures from your favorite photo printing place!  Just upload as an image to your favorite photo printing shop and resize as needed.  Coupon codes and deals are often e-mailed or found online to help bring down the cost.  Plus, there's no need to laminate as the photo comes back thick and glossy and ready to hang.

• Tired of fighting with your anchor chart paper to try and get it onto your easel through those two little holes?  Use a large binder clip to quickly and easily secure the paper pad onto the metal.  Just line the pad up with the metal back, and secure with a binder clip.  The paper stays put, and is still able to be flipped to the next page when needed.

•Use an extra basket or inexpensive dish pan to make a classroom "Borrow Bin".  Students have a go-to place for extra supplies they need and it gives you a spot to put supplies found on the floor or left over at the end of the school year.

•Use the terms "portrait" and "landscape" to refer to page direction when doing art or craft projects.  Students quickly learn the terms from a young age and are then able to apply it later when needed to print on a computer.

•Use the Sharpie Clear View Highlighter when highlighting text evidence with young learners.  The see through tip allows students to see the words they're highlighting and know when to stop.

•Teach paragraph structure with Mr. Sketch Markers by using colors to showcase each sentence and its purpose in the paragraph.  Students will love using the scented markers in their work and will be engaged in their writing!

•Make your anchor charts interactive by using Elmer's Glue to stick on necessary pieces like a story's sequence.

• Keep an Expo 2-in-1 Dry Erase Marker nearby for your small group instruction.  The 2-in-1 color makes it easy to model specific steps you want to have stand out.  For example, write a math equation in one color, and use the other to demonstrate the steps you do when regrouping.

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Start a borrow bin

An easy idea for lost and found school supplies! Use an extra basket or inexpensive dish pan to make a classroom "Borrow Bin." Students then have a go-to-place for extra supplies they need and it gives you a spot to put supplies found on the floor or left over at the end of the school year.

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Tools to Alleviate Classroom Anxiety

Whitney Begue

Glitter and Glue 4 K-2

Hello teacher friends! It’s that time of the year…back to school! Soon, our classrooms will have new, smiling faces, our empty bulletin boards will be filled with student work, and our cupboards will be bursting with new school supplies!

As a student, I always looked forward to back to school time (as I’m sure you did too!) I loved buying new school supplies! Filling my pencil box with brand new colorful markers, sharpened colored pencils, and full bottles of Elmer’s glue was so calming! It helped me to feel ready for a new year! (I really was meant to be a teacher, wasn’t I?!)

Unfortunately, there are students who do not find any part of back to school calming. To them, it might be downright stressful. The idea of a completely new routine, new people, and new concepts to learn can be very anxiety- producing for our little ones. Being an intervention specialist in the primary grades, many of my students struggle with feelings of anxiety. For example, students with autism can feel anxious about changes in their routine. Students with learning disabilities may compare themselves to their peers, which can cause anxiety in an academic setting. You may also find that students with no diagnosis may feel anxiety as well. Because anxiety in children is becoming more prevalent, and can be detrimental to student learning, it is crucial for us as teachers to address this. In this post, I am going to show you some ways to use those precious school supplies to make calming tools for your even more precious students! 1. Use your Expo Markers for checklists For many students, anxiety can stem from the uncertainty of a new routine. If you have students who have anxiety regarding certain tasks or moments in the day, create a simple checklist for them and laminate it. If students can visually see what is expected of them and what is coming next, it can help to reduce some anxiety. As students complete the tasks on the checklist, they can check them off with their Expo Marker. Best of all, when you use an Expo Marker on a laminated checklist, students can use it again and again!

2. Create a calm down bottle One of my favorite tools to help with anxiety is a calm down bottle! They are bright, beautiful, and filled with one of my favorite things… glitter! Best of all, you can easily make one in your own kitchen! Calm down bottles are a great break for students who are feeling anxious. Students just shake up the bottle and watch the glitter settle. It is a great little “time out” from an anxiety-producing situation.

To create a calm down bottle you will need: • An empty water bottle • Warm water • Loose glitter • Elmer’s Glitter Glue • Food coloring • A funnel to add the glitter (Happy teacher tip: Don’t forget this, or you will have a big glittery mess...) • Optional: hot glue to seal the lid on tight

To create the bottle: • Fill your water bottle about ¾ of the way full with warm water. Warm water will help the glitter glue separate.

Add about 3-4 drops of food coloring. You can always add more or less depending on the size of your water bottle, or how dark or light you want the color to be.

Squeeze about half of the bottle of Elmer’s glitter glue into the bottle. Again, you can always add more or less, depending on what you want.

Grab your funnel and sprinkle in some loose glitter.

Put the lid on tight! You may even want to add some hot glue to the lid to make sure it doesn’t come off when your students shake it. I always do this because the last thing I need is a neon-glitter concoction all over my students, classroom, and self.

Once you have finished this, you can add it to your classroom or even a small box filled with other calming tools. I like to even add small labels with directions to remind students of what to do.

3. Color a calming picture If you plan to have a calm down box or space in your classroom, a few coloring pictures can be a simple tool to add. Or, you can tuck them away in a folder. Many students find it calming to color pictures like mandalas or simple shapes. It can be a great break for students that are feeling stressed out over work completion! If you teach little ones, they will just love to color with these scented Mr. Sketch markers or crayons! Seriously, Mr. Sketch is how I won over one of my students who refused to work independently.

If you work with older students, try these Prismacolor colored pencils on a calming picture!

4. Special Supplies for the Teacher 

Teacher friends… I didn’t forget about you! Back to school time can be very stressful on us, too! There is so much to do in your classroom on top of all those meetings! Every year before I head back to school, I always buy myself some special supplies! I absolutely love my Paper Mate Flair Pens! They can brighten up your grading and make some of your note-taking during staff meetings a little more cheerful! 

Flair pens are part of my staff meeting necessities! Sharpies, Flair Pens, Inkjoy, and Mr. Sketch make me one happy teacher!

Hope some of these suggestions can help to relieve some of your students’ anxiety! Please note, depending on each individual student's need, not all of these suggestions may work for him or her. For example, a student may not like the texture of the slime or the scent of a certain marker. However, I’m sure some of these tips will work for your students! What tips do you have? Have a great school year and happy teaching!

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A quick tip to teaching page orientation

Tessa Maguire

Help students learn some computer lingo 

Use the terms "portrait" and "landscape" to refer to page direction when doing art or craft projects.  Students quickly learn the terms from a young age and are then able to apply it later when needed to print on a computer.

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Book Hospital

Maribel Sheehan

Keep track of the books that need a little love

Create a Book Hospital where your students can place damaged books.  You can repair them all at once when you have time.

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Keep your class distraction-free

Avoid noisy pencil sharpeners from disturbing your lesson.

An electric pencil sharpener can be a teacher's favorite tool, but it can sometimes cause a distraction in the classroom. How many times has your lesson been disrupted by a student who has a broken pencil? One tip is to have a large container of already sharpened pencils ready on your desk, and a second one for unsharpened ones. Assign the sharpening of pencils as a classroom task. Next time a student needs a sharpened pencil, they can quietly get one from your desk and place the broken one in the queue to be sharpened later.

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Rainbow Words: Free Sight Word Printable

Amy Mascott

Teach Mama

Learning sight words is one of the most important things that our kids can do as they become readers.

However, learning sight words can also be one of the most boring things our kids can do as they become readers. 

So it’s up to parents and teachers to make learning these important words fun.

Over the years, though, I’ve come up with tons of super cool and super fun ways that our little ones can learn these important words because I know how important it is.

Now that I’m back in the classroom and teaching first and second grade reading, I’ve had to re-visit these oldies but goodies for my students’ literacy centers. And you know me–I love it.

I have this Rainbow Words printable free for you below.

My students love when I pull out the Rainbow Words activity because they know it’s fun but they also know that they’ll be able to use PaperMate InkJoy Gel Pens.

Here’s the skinny. . .

Rainbow Words — Free Sight Word Printable

The reason sight words are important is because these are words that students need to learn to read by sight. That means, they need to be able to read these words anywhere and everywhere and they need to read them quickly.

Rainbow Words — Free Sight Word Printable

The reason sight words are important is because these are words that students need to learn to read by sight. That means, they need to be able to read these words anywhere and everywhere and they need to read them quickly.

Many sight words aren’t even words that can be sounded out, so most decoding strategies don’t work for them.

Kids just need to know them.

And Rainbow Words can help.

Each week, my students focus on 4-5 different sight words. We practice them every day, and we search for them in guided reading books.

Rainbow Words requires students to write six different sight words in the bands of the rainbow, in either red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple.

The cool thing about this printable is that it is totally customizable–you can write whatever words you want on the lines next to the colors. And after you write them, you can make copies for the students.

All I did was write the week’s words next to the colors:

red: from

orange: go

yellow: other

green: were

blue: am

purple: here

And the students took it from there!

To ensure that their sight words were written in the brightest, boldest colors, they used the amazing Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pens.

Who doesn’t love using gel pens?! These pens write easily and clearly, and they don’t smudge. They’re awesome–and they’re perfect for Rainbow Words!

If you want to download the Rainbow Words printable, please visit teachmama.com!

It’s a great activity for a literacy center, where students work independently, or it’s a great extra practice for students at home, after school.

One thing I made sure to add was two little extension activities for the early finishers:

1. Students can see how many sight words they can squeeze into the big cloud at the base of the rainbow. That way, they’re writing and counting!

2. Students can write sentences for each word on the back of the page.

There are always speedy workers, and they always need something to do to continue the learning!

What do you think? Will Rainbow Words work for your emerging readers? I’d love to know!

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Welcoming New Teachers

Tess Maguire

Tales from Outside the Classroom

I have been the new teacher (or staff member) several times, and no matter what it’s never fun.

I even returned to a building for a second time and was still incredibly nervous and felt out of place for quite some time.  Teachers aren’t always the most welcoming at the beginning of the year, even if we’re the nicest people- we’re busy getting our rooms ready, putting names on eight hundred million items, cleaning up the mess from the summer, unpacking from the summer, sweltering in the heat… I digress.  

New teachers, including the new-to-your-building teachers, are walking in stressed, probably busier than you are because they also have to do all of the above on top of learning everything new, and are feeling a certain amount of apprehension about the situation.  They’re wondering who is going to help them out and show them where the staff bathroom is.  They’re wondering if they are going to get along well with their grade level partners.  They’re wondering if things are going to be managed differently in this building than the building they student taught at or that they were at before (newsflash: they will be different). 

Because of these reasons, it’s great when a grade level, or a committee like a Sunshine Committee, can welcome these staff members with a little something. Sure, something that all of the new people get isn’t the most special, but it does show that you took that step to do something for them; to make them feel wanted.  Here are some of my favorite ideas.

Every teacher needs help taming the paper beast.  Brand new teachers often struggle immensely with this.  One little way to help them out is by giving them clips to help them maintain and manage their piles.  Use an Elmer’s Painters Medium Tip Paint Markers on a painted clothespin to label each one “copy, grade, file”.  Or, just use the Painters Paint Marker on a regular binder clip.  You could even attach a little ribbon or string!

Use Sharpie Water Based Paint Markers on a piece of bathroom tile to create personalized, custom drink coasters.  I buy the tiles in boxes and they are super cheap!  I usually get the box of 100 for like $25 and then I use them in different projects in the classroom.  Personalize the tiles with the staff member’s name and the school name and add a fun design.  After the paint has dried, and it dries super quickly, spray a coat or two of clear coat to seal it and help protect it from condensation.  Then, use some glue to place a piece of felt on the bottom to help keep the coaster gentle on surfaces.  This is even a fun project to get student groups like student council involved in.

All teachers, well maybe not all teachers but pretty much every teacher I know, enjoys (I could probably use the word ‘love’ couldn’t I?) markers, colorful pens, etc.  So they’re a great welcome gift with these cute sayings!  Click any of the pictures below to download the free printable file.

Paper Mate Ink Joy pens are my absolute favorite ballpoint pens!  They guide very smoothly and the colors are vivid and bold. This time of year I can always find packs pretty inexpensively, like this one with a bonus pen. PaperMate has several varieties of Ink Joy pens, including clickable gel pens.

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens are virtually every teacher’s favorite!  They are the perfect combination of pen and marker and are perfect for labeling and grading.  Buy a pink one and give it with this cute “tickled pink” tag.  The tag is perfect to give with a Pink Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Marker!

I love the colors that come in the Sharpie Color Burst Fine Point Permanent Markers (I also have and love them in the Ultra Fine Point Permanent Markers). The bright, vivid colors are the perfect addition to any teacher’s marker supply. And, because they’re a limited edition set, they may not be colors they already have.

You can download the free tags by clicking any of the links above or by clicking here: Teacher Welcome Gift Tags.

There are so many ways to welcome teachers into your building, whether it’s by lending a helping hand, giving a thoughtful gift, or just stopping in to check in on them.  Whatever you’re able to do to help make them comfortable as a new addition to your staff is appreciated.  Do you do something different in your building to welcome new teachers?  I’d love to hear some new ideas in the comments below.