Awesome Arts and Crafts Ideas for Kids

As a first grade teacher, I love arts and crafts for my class or even at home with my own twin boys. Students get involved in such a fun and creative way that learning takes place inadvertently. They build up motivation for school, eliminates boredom and creates active thinkers.

First I am going to introduce two activities that I created myself: the first one is the 2 Dimensional Pop Up Alphabet. This activity creates a fun learning experience for your students.

It gets students excited and motivated to learn the alphabet, for reading and writing. These fun and easy 2 Dimensional (2 D)-Pop-up activities are the perfect ones to help guide your students through the learning experience. 

 

They work well with mainstream students, English learners, and especially recommendable for students with special needs.

The second activity is the My first 3 Dimensional Alphabet Book. It ads a bit more complexity to the task, but still awesome for the younger learner.

Apart from my own creation, I adore making masks..

  

or using beads

Or even paper. Be careful with scissors and glue. They can play tricks on you!

Last, but not least, some recommendations for Amazon. Next you have My Fave Arts and Crafts Books for Kids. The products are unexpensive and they have more activities than you will ever use. 

1) The Todler Busy Book by Trish Kuffner.
365 creative games and activities to keep Your 1 1/2- to 3-Year-Old Busy

2) The Complete Book of Arts and Craft

This Complete Book of Arts and Crafts provides 256 pages of fun activities for children ages 5 to 9 that reinforce creative minds and motor skills! It includes paper, painting, musical, sculpting, and holiday crafts, as well as a complete answer key, user-friendly activities, and easy-to-follow instructions. --Over 4 million in print!

... and 

3)  Summer Bridge Activities

Prevent summer learning loss with our award winning, best-selling summer learning series! Summer Bridge Activities: Bridging Grades First to Second reinforces essential skills across the curriculum and helps prepare children for second grade. With 12 weeks worth of activities, completing Summer Bridge ActivitiesTM is the perfect way to keep skills sharp all summer long!

Do you have a favorite book or activity? Please share with us!

 

One Visual Lesson Plan

I am linking up to one of my favorite bloggers/teachers out there, Mrs. Wills Kindergarten. She is having a Linky party. 

 

I know my visual lesson plan does not look a good as hers. Sorry, male teachers still have a long way to catch up with females ones in so many (all) respects but especially in presentations...

  

Here is my visual plan for Swum Math. 

Hopefully you will enjoy!

Digital Daze Linky Party

Techie Teacher Tales is having another great Linky party. Please join us. We are going to have lots of fun!

Here is my take on their questionnaire. Enjoy!

Hall Pass and Sunny Days in Second Awesome Linky Parties

Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits is having a great Linky party. So is Sunny Days in Second Grade. I decided to join both.

Here is my hall pass. I will start.

1. My favorite product: All the products that Fonts 4 Teachers have created are awesome, but some of them have special connotations. Our Fonts 4 Teachers Deluxe is probably one of our latest big hits. It is a product designed for either Elementary school, English Learners, Special Education, Homeschooling... You name it.

You can create amazing worksheets for your class and tailor your instruction to all the students needs.

  The potential of this program is awesomeeeeeee!

2. My favorite area in the school: My favorite area is the technology station. Take a look a this beautiful place.

  

3. My signal: When I raise my hand to indicate that an activity is about to start and everyone has to listen carefully. No time to play.

  

4. Sanity: This is a big word for a teacher like me. I loose my patience very often, my sanity every minute and my mind... well I lost it a long time ago.

I hope you enjoyed the post! 

 

10 Strategies to Improve your Pinterest Profile

Another amazing post from marketing guru, Jeff Bullas. This post is especially relevant for those who have started using Pinterest recently and need some direction. Well this infographic will give you plenty of ideas. 

If you enjoyed this post, I would LOVE you to either:

    1) Join my site with Google Friend Connect or

  2) Follow my TPT store. Click here.

6 ABC Print Style Family Fonts

This collection of 6 PRINT or MANUSCRIPT fonts is specially designed for teachers, so as they can easily create hundreds of handwriting, spelling & penmanship lessons for students.
 

 

It contains the following 6 fonts:

1. ABC Print/Manuscript Master Font

2. ABC Print/Manuscript Dots Font

3. ABC Print/Manuscript Lines Font

4. ABC Print/Manuscript Dots Lines Font

5. ABC Print/Manuscript Arrows Font

6. ABC Print/Manuscript Arrows Dots Font

Type on Microsoft Word, or any other application, and enjoy these fonts' ability to trace lines, dots, arrows or a combination of all three.

 (Includes foreign punctuation marks-Spanish. Mac and Windows compatible. All operating systems)

3 Cool Things About Me (I am not Canadian)

As visitors to this blog grow fast, I feel like I have to open up a bit more and share some things about me:

1. My school: It is located South of Los Angeles. The funny thing is that back in the day, it was a predominantly Caucasian neighborhood. Years later it changed into an all African American community. And right now, it is mostly Latino. What about that?

2. My favorite sport: I am a big fan of soccer (sorry Hockey!), also called football in Europe and all over the world. I play every week with my friends. In fact, we are playing tonight. This is the place we play.

 

3. Something that makes me feel awesome: When my boys come to my bed on the weekend. Priceless!

 Here with my beautiful wife!

 

St. Patrick's Day Free Clip Art Images

Enjoy this free collection of 14 clip art images for your projects during St. Patrick's day.

Especially designed by clip art master designer Ramon Abajo. All the images you need for this special day. Students can color some of the images. 

 

Do you like them? I hope so. You can go to our TPT Store and download for free. 

We have recently uploaded to our store the St. Patrick's Day Digital Clipart Alphabet Letters. 

You are going to love! Click here and see for yourself.