At the beginning of the school year, we know it’s all about herding cats and teaching procedures. Those procedures include how to use our school supplies. Those school supply procedures are the idea behind our Back To School Research Project! Since our research projects are a key part of our curriculum I love that we jump right into research projects at the beginning of the year to set the expectations for school supplies and for how our research projects will work.
School Supplies Anchor Charts
For each of our school supplies, we create an anchor chart. Before or right after our first time using each of the school supplies, we create an anchor about what the supply can do and what it cannot do! The students share the do’s and don’ts of each of the supplies so they have ownership in the procedures! This is key to a successful classroom: students must be allowed to take ownership of their classroom! They must have a voice in setting procedures and expectations. I tell my students that it is not MY classroom but OUR classroom. And it’s not MY stuff but OUR stuff! This ownership means we have more respect for our stuff! And we have less damage to our supplies!
Cutting And Pasting And Number Practice
After we make our anchor chart, our next back to school research activity is designed to meet several objectives: fine motor skills, cutting, gluing, coloring, and number recognition and number order! And they’re fun! These are our school supply puzzles!
Math And Literacy Centers
And of course we have back to school supply math and literacy centers for letters, sounds, numbers and counting!
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Check out these other research projects from our classroom!
For more back to school ideas, check out these posts:
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2 comments
I have a question I am hoping you can help me with! I love all of your blogs by the way. One of my biggest struggles is how to attend to students that struggle with sitting still on the carpet during these beginning of the year activities. I know it is important to get them up and “wiggle them” because their attention spans are short, but how do you address students that lay down, turn around, push their legs out, etc, at the beginning of the school year? Do you stop teaching/your activity and address it right away?
At the beginning of the year, we stop whatever we are doing and I address it immediately. As the year progresses, sometimes it is appropriate to ignore it because they are simply wanting attention but that is on a case by case basis!