Back to school goodies...

How is it September 1st already? I just cannot believe how quickly the summer went this year. It was so busy that I think I remembered to enjoy it! We had my sister, brother in law and my beautiful niece Charlie visit from Scotland for most of the month in July. It was filled with all kinds of fun times like camping, food, family photos, food, get togethers... did I mention food? Then I went to Vancouver for almost a week to attend the International Reading Recovery Conference with some amazing colleagues! I am in love with that city... it was still beautiful Canada with the same heat as Nova Scotia... but without the humidity, which was a dream. Next I started focusing on school here and there but still managed to get together with friends, have some relaxing times before heading back into the swing of things this week. Four days of conferences about Assistive Technology and Trauma based learning along with one full day spent setting up my Reading Recovery Office (stay tuned for a preview on that one next week).

I have been into school probably a dozen times since the beginning of August and I have to say this is the most exciting year for setting up yet! I have been teaching for 6 years and finally got permanent this year (Wahoo)! I was pretty excited to hang my new name plate from Tallahassee Sunday on my door the other day. She does such a gorgeous job and it is so colourful! I love that I get to look at it for the rest of my career (along with the other grade one teachers at my school as I gave them all one for a gift last year).

So here we are talking about back to school and I wanted to share some of my great products to keep those little minds busy for just a little while anyway :)

First, it seems important to talk about my best seller. Over the years I have created quite the little collection of Bingo's in my store. I have numbers, ten frames, holidays. No matter what you are looking for, I probably have it and if I don't, send me a request and I will see what I can do for you! I loooooooove getting requests! I will be coming out with some new ones this year too that I am pretty excited about. My Number Bingo from 1-20 is my most popular set but below you will see an assortment of all my back to school related Bingo's.

Next up on the docket, is my practice activities. I have taught primary and grade one and I always found these were super helpful for students who needed a little bit more practice. Giving students tactile activities like the Number Playdoh Mats and Letter Playdoh Mats below are so much fun and educational. My students loved it when they were playing with the Playdoh, so much so, that they didn't mind doing a little bit of learning at the same time. We used Playdoh a lot in our Math and Literacy centres. I also have some Number Practice sheets that I often will send home with students to help them become more acquainted with numbers to 20. Those teen numbers are tricky and a lot needed the extra help last year.

I also love the Modifiable Blank Calendars because they are so versatile. Last year we used them to track our weather for the month and would have some great conversations about our first rainy day/snowy day/sunny day. The students were even able to count up the days and we did a lot of graphing activities with these. It was so useful for such a simple task. At the end of the year, they had a duotang filled with the year at a glance. This year, I think we will also track how many days we are in school on these little calendars.

The products that I am most excited about have got to be my new classroom line! I have been meaning to organize my books for the longest time! This summer I decided to stop wasting time and created some Library Labels (White Background) and Library Labels (Chalkboard Edition). Then I decided to go a little further and create some Word Wall Letters and words that matched these two sets (White Background and Chalkboard Edition). Needless to say, I could not wait to put some of them to use in my classroom. As most of you know, I don't have my own classroom exactly so I had to modify them to best suit what I did have. I hope that you get to use them in your classroom though because I bet they will be gorgeous! I cannot wait to see your pictures! Classroom pictures have got to be my favourite!

That is just to name a few of the finds over at Teaching with MaGee. Head over to see if there is anything else you may want to take a peak at! :)

So, now tell me, what have you been doing this summer? Share with me your great memories as we get ready to fly back into the classroom this coming week! Chat soon :)