Most Used Resources This Year

At the end of every school year I like to take time and reflect back over the year and think about what activities worked well and what I need to improve.  This year I found myself in new role as the primary resource teacher.  I worked with grades K4 - 2nd grade in the classroom and pulling students who needed one on one instruction.

I started out the year assessing the new four year old students to see where they were at and checking up on their progress throughout the year.  I created this assessment binder to grab and go when it was time to assess one of the little ones.  I have everything I need in it to check in on their progress all year long.

These name bags were a hit at the beginning of the year and again in the middle of the year when I added their last name.  I used these with the little four year olds and they loved setting up their names.  I had these bags on the table as they enter the room.  It was the first thing they did.  It was really helpful because they referred to the letters in their name all year long.  We even referred the letters in our friends names as well.

We played these Bingo games all year round.  I put the capital letter bingo and lowercase bingo back to back and we switched it up.  I did the same with the number bingo as well.  At the beginning of the year I played the number bingo 1-30 with the 5 year olds and towards the end of the year I was playing the 1-20 number bingo with the 4 year olds.  I also used the number and letter cards to play other board games as well. We switched up our markers to holiday markers throughout the year.  This was a favorite that they begged to play each week.

Oh my gosh the kids loved the letters on the stones.  They loved putting them in order and they loved using them to match pictures and letters for beginning sounds.  I used them with the K5 and first graders to do making words exercises.  I think it was a texture thing.  The kids loved the smooth cool feeling of the rocks.  I even made a second set with capital letters to match up. 

These sensory cards were a free item I got from Oriental Trading Company and they were a hit with my four year old students.  They loved touching them and we made up lots of activities with them however their favorite were the sandboxes.  They loved tracing the letters and then drawing the letters in the sand that I found at the dollar store.

Stick Bang is a game that cost little money to make and the kids love to play it.  I made so many different versions of this game.  However I think the favorite was this lollipop version I made for the four year olds.  

My Mystery Number Box was a huge hit.  I found these number cards in a Math Packet I had already purchased on TPT.  I printed them and mounted them on card stock and laminated them.  Then I found an empty Kleenex box and that's where I put the cards.  I used these cards for so many activities:  Number Identification, Greater Than/Less Than, Put the numbers in order from Greatest to Least, from Least to Greatest.   Grab a number and then find one more/one less/ten more/ten less, number of the day,  adding and subtracting activities. 

I looked and looked and I couldn't find where I got these cards from but I know they were something I found I TPT. 

These reference folders were something I used daily with a lot of my older students.  I have math activities on the outside and language activities on the inside.  I found this idea in one of the kindergarten classrooms at my school and I used resources I already had and found free resources that I could use to complete my folders.