Ring in the New Year

Happy New Year

What better way to welcome the new year than with my New Year’s 2025 Activity Packet!  This carefully designed resource is perfect for keeping your students engaged while reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the future. Whether you’re a teacher, parent, or homeschooler, this resource offers a variety of fun and meaningful activities tailored for young learners.

What’s Included

Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll find in the New Year’s 2025 Activity Packet:

1.       Reflection Pages: Help students look back on 2024 with creative writing prompts and fun drawing activities that encourage self-expression.

2.      Goal-Setting Worksheets: Start the year strong with prompts that inspire students to set realistic and personal New Year’s resolutions.

3.      Creative Crafts: Hands-on projects that allow students to create festive decorations or keepsakes to celebrate 2025.

4.      Math and Literacy Practice: Skills-based activities with a New Year’s twist to keep learning exciting and relevant.

5.      Games and Puzzles: Entertain and challenge students with a word search and more!

Why You’ll Love This Resource

• Engaging and Easy to Use: Perfect for students of varying levels, this packet is designed to be both fun and educational.
• Time-Saving: Print-and-go activities make preparation a breeze.
• Festive and Meaningful: Combine the joy of New Year’s celebrations with thoughtful reflection and skill-building exercises.

How to Use This Resource

• Back-to-School Kickoff: Use it during the first week back from winter break to ease into routines while sparking creativity.
• Homeschool: Add a festive flair to your curriculum while teaching the value of reflection and goal-setting.

Get Ready for 2025

Celebrate the start of a new year with activities that your students will love.

Click here to grab your New Year’s 2025 Activity Packet

Map Skills

In first grade, students are just beginning to explore the world around them in more concrete ways. One of the most exciting concepts for young learners to grasp is understanding maps and how they can represent real-world locations. Teaching map skills in first grade lays the groundwork for spatial awareness, problem-solving, and geographic understanding. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the essential map skills that first graders need to learn and share how our First Grade Map Skills Resource can make this learning experience fun and interactive.

Why Map Skills Are Important in First Grade

Map skills go beyond learning how to read a map. They teach children:

• Spatial Awareness: Understanding where things are in relation to each other.
• Critical Thinking: Problem-solving and following directions to navigate a map.
• Geographic Understanding: Developing a sense of the world outside their immediate environment, which can spark interest in different places and cultures.
• Abstract Thinking: Learning that symbols on a map represent real-world objects, a foundational concept for more complex thinking in math and literacy.

Essential Map Skills for First Graders

At this stage, first graders are ready to start building on simple map concepts. Here are the core map skills that students will develop:

1. Cardinal Directions

Students are introduced to the four cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. Using a compass rose on a map, they begin to understand how directions help us locate places. First graders might practice simple activities like identifying what’s "north" of their school or where the playground is in relation to the cafeteria.

2. Map Symbols and Keys

Maps use symbols to represent real objects, and first graders learn to read these symbols through a map key. They’ll see pictures of trees, houses, rivers, and roads that stand for real-life features and practice matching these symbols with what they represent.

3. Simple Landforms and Bodies of Water

Students begin to identify basic landforms (like mountains and valleys) and bodies of water (rivers, lakes, oceans) on maps. By recognizing these features, they start understanding how geography shapes the world around them.

4. Understanding Location

First graders practice using terms like “left,” “right,” “near,” and “far” to describe where things are located on a map. They might start with simple tasks like following directions from one place to another, helping them grasp relative locations.

5. Reading Simple Maps

By first grade, students are ready to start interpreting simple maps of familiar places like the classroom, their neighborhood, or even a treasure map! Learning to trace routes and understand what different map features represent builds confidence in reading maps.

6. Creating Their Own Maps

One of the most exciting parts of teaching map skills is allowing students to create their own maps. First graders can draw maps of their classroom, school, or community, using symbols and labels to represent real-life locations. This hands-on activity reinforces map-reading skills and encourages creativity.

Fun Activities for Teaching First Grade Map Skills

• Compass Rose Hunt: Students go on a scavenger hunt around the classroom or playground, using cardinal directions to find hidden objects.
• Create a Map Key: Children design their own map key, selecting symbols for different places or objects in their school or neighborhood.
• Follow the Path: Using a simple map, students follow directions like “move three steps east” or “go two steps south” to navigate their way through a classroom obstacle course.
• Design Your Own Treasure Map: Students create a treasure map for a fun "hunt," practicing map-making and symbol use.

Check out this Map Skills resource to help you teach your Map Skills unit.

New Position

I am now officially an English Language Learner Teacher. When I was an Instructional Coach one of my responsibilities was to work closely with our ELL teacher and guess what I totally feel in love with ELLs. When an ELL position opened up at my school I had to jump and take it. I am so excited for this new position and looking forward to this new journey.

 

Here's a picture of my classroom this year. 

Happy New Year

Happy New Year

It's been a while since I have blogged. It was a very busy year. One major change was that I moved schools. I'm still teaching but now I teach at my neighborhood school. It's really cool seeing my students not only at school but in the neighborhood riding their bikes or playing outside. My daughter started Kindergarten and I couldn't resist the opportunity to teach at her school and I get to see her cute little face every day there.

First Day of School AM. Look at that cute face!

  

First Day of School PM. She had a fantastic 1st day!

Here are some pictures of my new classroom. 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving Print and Go

It's almost time to celebrate Thanksgiving. It's one of my favorite holidays. I would like to introduce THANKSGIVING PRINT AND GO. It's a brand new resource in my store that's part of my Print and Go Series.

Here's a peek of what is inside of this resource.

 

 

 

 

 

Grab this resource in my TpT store here.

 

 

 

Check out Turkey Day too!

 

 

 

 

 Have a great time learning about Thanksgiving!