Activities for Centers and Small Groups on Pinterest

If you're a teacher or parent looking for small group and center activities, here is a Pinterest board with a variety of free and priced options. 

Ironically, there is no way to directly pin one Pinterest board to another (or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it.) That's why I had to write a blog post. 

Since you're here, please feel free follow my blog for more posts about my picture books and activities for kids. Here's the link to go directly to my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Currently there are 13 items, of which 7 are free and 2 are on sale for a week.

If you have a blog with posts about education, please leave a comment so I can go check it out. Thanks so much for stopping by!

Symmetry is Eggciting!

For this activity it's easier to show an eggsample:

There are 10 different designs with a Spring theme such as a bunny, tulip, and a basket of eggs. Easter is coming soon so if you need a fun math + art project, please check out the Preview on my TeachersPayTeachers store. It includes a free sample of the ladybug and butterfly designs to try.

The full PDF has two levels: the half designs as shown above or complete ones for kiddos who are too young to draw the missing part. The young ones can color in their egg to make it symmetrical. Here are a couple with a weather theme:

The cover shows the bird sitting on a nest and the frog:

I had a great time creating this, hope you and your kiddos enjoy it! Please follow my blog and my TPT store to hear about new books and activities.

Update: For a wonderful blog post by a new 2nd grade teacher who used this with her students and took lots of great photos, check out Luckeyfrog's Lilypad!

Spring Basket Craftivity

A year or two after graduating from college, I made a list of career goals and one of them was to create craft books. While a few of my earliest picture books had some crafts included, for the most part that interest of mine has been on the back burner. Now that the digital age is upon us, it's much easier to test ideas online and see how it goes. Since December, I've been posting free and priced products on my Teachers Pay Teachers store and have sold quite a few things. Thousands of my freebies have been downloaded, which is pretty amazing.

But the real fun has been to think of an idea, design and make it, and put it online to see how people like it. No waiting for an editor to respond, no printing/shipping/etc. to deal with, just neat little electrons being exchanged amongst people with common interests. Here is the latest one, called What's In My Basket? It's a printable "craftivity" which (to me, anyway) means a craft with an educational component. This is what the basket looks like closed with the contents "peeking" out:

And here it is opened up:

For the educational part, students read and write spring-themed words, plus complete a writing prompt. A group of these would look cute on a bulletin board, don't you think? 

What gave me the idea to have the flap that opens is all those "interactive" apps that are now available for mobile phones and tablets. My theory is that there are plenty of interactive things to be done with paper, crayons, markers, and scissors, right? Click here to check out the various items in my TPT store. And if you're interested, by all means "follow" my store to be notified of new things as they are posted.

Thanks for stopping by!

Spring Mirror Word Puzzles

Don't worry, your screen isn't broken. This image is from Spring Mirror Word Puzzles, a word work + math activity I made to go with my new picture book Seeing Symmetry. Some of the Spring-theme words are reversed and/or upside down while some of them are missing half, like this:

Students will need a small mirror to solve the puzzles and record the answers. To download your free copy of this 5 page activity PDF from my Teachers Pay Teachers store, just click this link or the cover image below:

If you're on Pinterest, I have a board full of great pins about symmetry. Pinterest has become my favorite social media site because it's so visual. If you're interested in joining, I'll be happy to send you an invite (which is much faster than requesting one from the site.)

Anyway, hope you and your kiddos enjoy this activity…all fingers are crossed for an early Spring!