GIVEAWAY

 A Bonus Sale--and a GIVEAWAY!

I have a $10 Gift Certificate to Teachers Pay Teachers to give away that can be used in my store or any other. You can use it Monday, August 22 during the flash sale for even more savings! 

How to enter: 

1. Subscribe to my blog by email using the Follow by Email box in the sidebar. Make sure you check your email and click the Feedburner subscription confirmation! 

2. Comment on this post to let me know you've done it! 

Winner will be chosen at random before bedtime tonight, and I'll email you your gift card! 

I hope to use this blog this year to share new and seasonal resources with you. I have lots waiting to be updated and posted--especially sight word practice and even more mini books! 

Thank you for your interest in my products and for helping me support my growing family! ❤️

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

Switching Gears

My growing family on Father's Day, 2016

I've always had big dreams of being a funny, informative, encouraging blogger like some of the ladies I love to follow. However, I am not a blogger. I'm just not! I'm not good at that type of writing, not organized enough, have way too much on my plate, and at the moment I don't even have a classroom full of hilarious kinders to write funny stories about.

However, I do have ideas and resources to share with other teachers--especially for those of you teaching bilingual preschool, kinder, and even first grade. So, three years after my most recent post, I'm switching gears. This will be a space to highlight resources I have available on TeachersPayTeachers.com, and additional extension activities that are related to my products. If you are subscribing, don't expect frequent emails (which is probably a relief!). Maybe a post a month or so? Maybe just seasonally? Or when I post new products?

A bit about me: My name is Michelle and I taught six years in a small community. I taught one year of 5th grade, three years of Title I math & reading part time, and five years of bilingual (English/Spanish) kindergarten. I worked at 3 schools in four years, and when I was invited to work at the 4th school in our district, I politely declined and went half-time. At the end of that year I got pregnant with my first baby, so I resigned and the following fall I did some subbing, volunteered in my former classroom to help train my replacement, and contracted with the school district to do beginning-of-the-year testing for incoming kinders and ELLs. It was a great way to transition from teaching to being a stay-at-home mom without going "cold turkey!"

I haven't subbed like I thought I would, but it has been fun to stay in touch with my teacher friends and continue following my favorite bloggers to feel connected with the education world. My days are busy with a toddler and another baby on the way, and I love spending the occasional nap time creating new minibooks or revamping curriculum I created for my classroom into products I can share. If there's anything you need for your classroom or a particular topic of guided reader you'd like to see, please leave a comment or email me! mrsdoring (at) gmail (dot) com