Back to School Minibooks

What are your favorite activities for the first days of school?

We always read The Gingerbread Man and then he would visit and leave clues for us all over the school as a way for us to get a tour of all the places in our school and practice lining up. The second or third day of school we would find gingerbread cookies in the Principal's office! Always a huge hit.

Another thing I tried so hard to do with my scared little kinderbabies was to help them feel successful at school! I loved to have a book or two that first week that we could practice and "read" together from memory and get them excited about reading at school!

I inherited some old Scholastic minibooks that had been copied and recopied over the years where I had crossed out words and hand-written them to make the vocabulary more appropriate for my students, but we really needed something new! It was with this in mind that I created three new Back-to-School Minibooks. This pack includes one level A/1 book, and two level B/2 readers. I rarely if ever had students reading on the first day of school, so we mostly did whole-group choral reading with these books until they had them memorized and could take them home to read!

Many years I even had the kids decorate shoe boxes the first week of school or on Open House night and sent them home as "Treasure Boxes" to store all their little books in when they went home. I'm sure many of them ended up in the trash, but I've had several students bring them back years later which is always fun (and even had younger siblings show up with beat-up copies of treasure box books from years earlier!).

These new books focus on things we do and use at school. Things like listening to the teacher, playing outside, walking in line, entering the classroom (anyone else need a good social story for kids stuck out in the hallway?!), sitting on the carpet or at tables, and making friends. Supplies featured include backpacks, glue sticks, scissors, pencils, crayons, erasers, and markers. Check them out in my TpT store! Books are available in English, Spanish, and a Bilingual Bundle.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Mrs-Doring