TpT and a Ben Franklin FREEBIE!

Guess who's joined the world of TpT?  That's right, little old me!  The shop is still pretty empty, but there are a couple of freebies AND my first for-sale unit!  Here's what ya can find...

So you know how the first week of school is...busy, busy, busy!  And the mornings can be...um...how do I put this delicately...CHAOTIC.  Sniffling kids, lost parents, school supplies spilling out of bookbags, and let's not forget the two or three or four attendance counts that MUST be done by 9 AM.  It's brutal, especially when our little first grade sweeties are just getting used to the first grade routine!  The first week or so I try to have SUPER EASY Morning Work that they can do mostly independently so that I am free to handle crises put out fires take care of teacherly business...I also need assignments that might take a smidge longer than my normal MW assignments because the morning arrival stretches out just a bit those first few days (at least for me-late buses, new students, late morning announcements, et. cetera).  SO!  I will share with you in an upcoming post one of my tricks for first week 'o school Morning Work, but this might tide you over for now..my first TpT download is a little Book About Me for the kiddos to work on during the first week of school craziness.  Head over to my TPT shop to check it out!  It's pretty flexible...you could also use it for writing portfolio baselines, filler work, or toss it into a Sub Tub for an unexpected absence.

Okay, now on to the Social Studies goodness! Have I mentioned that one of my summer classes is a content literacy course?  Well, it is...I have learned SO much and I'm really thinking about how I teach Social Studies and how I can do it better!  One of my focuses (foci?  What's the right word here?) for the class is a specific standard that I have to teach about the most RANDOM collection of American historical figures ev-ah: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark and Sacgawea, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and Theodore Roosevelt...if you're shaking your head right now because you can't figure out what these folks have in common, don't worry, I'm right there with ya!  But it's a standard, so away we go!  I am in the process of creating mini-units about each one of these fun Americans...believe it or not I'm learning a little bit as I go, too (which is a little scary considering I've been teaching about these people for going on FIVE YEARS!).  I posted my first one tonight and here's a little preview...

SQUEE!  I am just a leeeettle excited about this...emergent reader, graphic organizers, writing papers, vocab cards, quote bubbles, a poem (that I WROTE...and I would not call myself a poet...but I realized that there's ZERO poems out there about Mr. Franklin, so what's a first grade teacher to do?!), and this little cutie right here...

Yup, a craftivity.  I LOVE writing craftivities.  They are tons of fun for the kids and I totally hold them over their heads as an incentive to get their writing to a good place.  The whole shebang is available in my TPT shop!

Also...there is a teensy little freebie that I uploaded as a companion...it's an All About Benjamin Franklin writing paper.  Nothing fancy...but if you're interested head on over to scoop it up.

I am so excited to begin this new adventure!  I have been saying for a long time that I wanted to open a TpT shop and I am FINALLY doing it.  I have lots of ideas-if you are a Georgia teacher especially, get excited because I am about tackle some of these trickier frameworks lessons to make some things that are a little more teacher and student friendly.

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