Super Family Literacy Night: Superhero Themed Reading Events! *Freebie!

If there's one thing I love, it's a good theme. In my own classroom, the theme was "bees". Obviously. 

But every year, my librarian buddy and I try to plan a new and fun theme for the kids to center our reading events around. 

We make bulletin boards, celebrate the 25 Book Campaign with the theme, and even plan our Family Literacy Night around it, too. 

 

Last year, (yes, it's been a whole year and I haven't blogged about this yet - give me a break, I got married :) our reading theme was Superheroes! 

Superheroes are a great theme, because what kid doesn't want to be a superhero? It also lends itself to lots of fun, creative activities and events. 

In this post, I'll share a little bit about how we used this superhero theme to build excitement about reading! 

We also used it for our Family Literacy Night, which is our BIG literacy event each year!

We used superhero bulletin boards for everything - our GIANT  25 Book Campaign recognition board:

We divided up the space into months and posted each teacher's name under the month. After the 25 Book Campaign for that month had been turned in, we took pictures of each class' students who participated! They were proud to be featured on our board!

Our welcome back to reading board at the front of the school:

 

You can read about that here!

And of course, our Family Literacy Night. The year before, we had a Camping Themed Literacy Night, but this year, our theme was Super Family Literacy!  

The week before the evening we were celebrating literacy, I created student bookmarks, tickets, pledges and stuffed brightly colored (donated) plastic bags with the materials they would need for the evening. 

I put the reading pledge sheet and the bookmark inside the bag. Some (about 15) of the Reading Pledges had a pumpkin sticker in the corner. 

If a child received a pledge with a pumpkin sticker, he/she could choose a free book to take home when they turned it in!

To the outside, I stapled their "Super Snack" ticket. This ensures that each student actually gets one snack - if they get more than one, we'll run out and some won't get any. 

We notified kids that they could wear their costumes because it was a couple days before Halloween. It was absolutely adorable. 

As kids arrived, we handed out the bags and directed them gym floor to listen to the book, Dex: Heart of a Hero being read aloud. It was absolutely adorable - such a precious story about a wiener dog who decided enough is enough! He takes action to get stronger and quicker, and of course ends up saving the day. 

After that, we directed them to complete several of the seven stations we had available to develop literacy and family fun! After completing each station, each child received several pieces of candy in their bags (we had plastic pumpkins full of candy and spider rings at each station). They carried their bags from place to place, completing stations, collecting candy, and having fun!

This was our Smack Attack Station: here, students listened to words being read from cards by the teacher, and then used the superhero-decorated flyswatter to smack the rhyming word!

At our Secret Identities Station, students decorated a cardstock cutout of a mask and used yarn to wear it!

We Need a Hero! required students to create a superhero using alliteration and then illustrate a cover for a comic book!

Everything we do, we do in English and Spanish to grow bilingualism in our students and help our Spanish-speaking parents communicate with their children about these activities.

At this station, This Looks Like a Job For..., students used a sentence strip to create a comic book about a superhero! 

At the Super Snack Station, kids decorated cookies to look like superhero symbols! Each student received one snack ticket as they arrived, stapled to their bag. When they arrived, we collected the ticket to help make sure we didn't have repeat customers at the snack station!

Of course, we had a building words station! Kids wrote "Superheroes read" on a sentence strip and cut between the letters to make cards. Then they built as many words as they could using those letters - parents actually got pretty competitive here! 

Our most simple station was the Reading Headquarters. We used the gym stage and added some cozy furniture and a rug to make it an inviting area to read in!

We added some baskets of high-interest books and (here's the best part) made capes out of plastic tablecloths and yarn!

Students donned a cape and read a book with their buddies in Reading Headquarters! Even some of our older students enjoyed doing this!

A week or so later, I finally took all the pictures, pledges, and student products we had been given, and created our Super Family Literacy Night display in one of our glass display cases!

 

Want to learn more? Check out my How to Plan an Awesome Family Night video!

 

  

To grab the materials I made for our Family Literacy Night and to host one of your own, visit TPT and check out my new Super Family Literacy Night Materials, and now it's available in English and Spanish, too!   

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Our latest book of the month: One Tiny Turtle!

Throughout the year, we've had several school-wide Books of the Month. Each month, every teacher receives a copy of the book and uses it to teach reading and writing lessons. This month (April), the Book of the Month is One Tiny Turtle by Nicola Davies. This book is the charming story of a Loggerhead Turtle's life and represents an incredible story of survival and instinct. It's a great book to integrate life science concepts, too.  Whenever we have a new Book of the Month, I create a bulletin board to introduce the book to our teachers and students. This was our bulletin board this month.

To share the story of the turtle's life, I included sea turtle facts all over the board.

I was especially happy with the 3-D elements of the board, including the seaweed and the border. To make the ruffled border, I cut strips of butcher paper. I staple the end down onto the board, made a ruffle and stapled above it. Then I made another and stapled, and so on. It added some wavy-oceany-texture to the board!

Our first grade teachers were responsible for putting together a display to represent their student responses to the book, and they really rose to the occasion. It's a tall order because our display cases are large and take up an entire section of the main hallway - that's a lot of space to fill, but the teachers did an incredible job! Below are some of the adorable products they created with their kids! Each class made a special product to respond to the book!

These turtles feature life cycles on their shells!

Tissue paper turtles must have been so much fun to make!

The spirals include little cards where the students sequenced the events of the story, and below are 3-d dioramas of the sea turtle's nest.

The kids retold the maine events of the story in an accordion fold.

How cute are these 3-D shells? The teacher did a beautiful job of creating a realistic environment!

These turtles are hanging on strips of box tape back-to-back to make them look like they're swimming through the space!

That's a lot of display case!

The teachers did a beautiful job responding to our Book of the Month! Pin It

Dr. Seuss Display

So, like most of my big projects, this one was waaaaay overdue. But I wanted to share the display that I put together to celebrate Dr. Seuss and Read Across America! We had so many pictures of our kids and teachers participating in different events that I had to show it off!

I love using cute fonts to create displays -it adds so much texture!

I printed out the letters "Read Across America" in one of my favorite Kimberly Geswein fonts and cut them out. Then I taped them onto some colorful yarn and draped them across the top.

We printed out pictures of our kids celebrating Dr. Seuss and stuck them to the front of the display. We had pictures from our guest readers (read about that here). The kids LOVE to see themselves on display!

To tie up the ends, I made big yarn bows and taped them to the corners.

Inside, I put our collection of Seuss books and stuffed animals, along with the truffula trees and Seuss Arrows I made last week. You can read about how to make those here! Pin It

Book of the Month: Ruby's Wish

Why did I spend half an hour making Chinese lanterns out of construction paper?

Because this month, our school-wide Book of the Month is Ruby's Wish! 

Ruby's Wish is a great story about a little girl who lives in China in the past. She is part of a large family with many, many children. The boys in the family are treated specially and allowed to go to school with no other responsibilities. But Ruby wants to go to school, too! She shows her grandfather how much she wants to go. I always get choked up at the end, even when I read it to the teachers (so embarrassing). 

So this month, to display the Book of the Month, this is the bulletin board I put together.

The curtains and the "introducing..." part are always up for the Book of the Month board, but we change out the cover and the other materials on the board with each new book. This time, I opted for some fun facts about Chinese New Year (which Ruby celebrates in the book. 

I found my facts here: 18 Top Facts about Chinese New Year

I decorated each fact with adorable clipart from Creative Clips

And I learned to make the Chinese lanterns from this TPT freebie from First Grade Hip Hip Hooray!

Will you teach your kids about Chinese New Year this year? What will you do?

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Hats off to a New Year Craftivity, Bulletin Board, and Freebie

I love winter break. I can stay up as late as I want, and when I know I can stay up till two thirty, I seem to get more done during the day. I'm a night owl. I'm envious of people who are morning people but my natural time clock says stay up till two thirty and sleep till eleven.  That's so not going to fly next week when I go back to work.  Maybe I should make getting up early one of my New Year's resolutions.  Ehhhhhhh nope. Tonight in my keyboarding frenzy (with a glass full of chocolate vodka - thanks, Mom for the gift- and Dexter on Netflix) I worked and worked on a cute idea I had for a bulletin board display to help kids think about their goals and resolutions for the upcoming year! 

For only 2.00 at my TPT store, you get materials for the craftivity and a bulletin board display! And if you'd like a little taste in the form of a freebie, check out my Countdown to New Year's Goals freebie on TPT! 

Happy third day of January! Pin It

Reading is our SuperPower! Bulletin Board Idea

Oh my gosh. I have so much to tell you that I don't know where to start. In the month and a half since I last really blogged (two weeks before my wedding and the month since!) a lot has happened.
- It is getting dark early and this causes me issues with my emotional health. - All things pumpkin are available and this causes me issues with my eating habits. - Christmas is coming and this causes me issues with my finances.
In short, I have issues of the seasonal variety.
But, in spite of ALL THESE ISSUES, I have lots of school stuff to tell you! I'm really going to try to stay focused with this post, even though I am muy excited about a lot of the new things we've done this year. 
Our theme this year for reading is Super Readers: Reading is our Superpower. We have tried to weave this into lots of different initiatives on our campus, including our family literacy night and the 25 Book Campaign. 
At the beginning of the year, my librarian and I decided to do the superhero theme and so I scoured (where else?) pinterest for superhero ideas! I found a pin about a superhero bulletin board and I thought, "I could do that. I can easily make a superhero bulletin board for our main hallway. I will ask teachers to contribute pictures of themselves reading and put them up. This will be fun."

This is the finished product! I will share with you how my masterpiece came to be.

First, I looked at this pin on pinterest:

Unfortunately, it's just linked to a google images search.

The bulletin board in the main hallway was already covered in red fabric. I took the black and I unrolled a large sheet. I crawled around the floor and sketched the shape of the buildings and then I cut them out in one large piece. 

I cut out the letters and a sunset as well. And then I got to staplin'.

This didn't really take a long time. I stapled it here and there and added the sunset in the background. And then I got a little excited about some details.

In case you can't read it, the people are saying, "It's the BOOK signal!" I know. I'm dorky. My husband already made fun of me, so please don't feel like you have to contribute.

I added the sign (so important, I know) because details are important to me. I'm not really sure that any child has even read this sign, but I do every time I pass by and it makes me laugh.

So at this point, I realized I needed to add yellow windows. I went back to my classroom and cut up a bunch of yellow paper into rectangles and squares. I grabbed several glue sticks and a rolling chair and went back to the board. I started on the right side (you can probably figure that out, actually, when you see how many "lights are on" on the right side versus the left! I glued the yellow squares to the buildings and scooted some more and glued some more. I had been glueing and scooting for about eight minutes when I began to ask myself whose stupid idea this was. I mean, who hand-glues on ALL the windows in a WHOLE CITY?! I kept glueing, and people kept walking by saying things like, "Almost!" and "That's a lot, Miss!" 

Yes. It was.

After about fifteen or so minutes of glueing and scooting, the town of Readopolis was pretty well lit (good enough for who it's for, my mother always said).

Then I petitioned the teachers to send me pictures of them reading! I've been adding them as they come in, and I also am beginning to add pictures of kids reading around the school, too. We are super readers!

We are continuing this theme throughout our reading program this year! Check back soon to read about our superfun Family Literacy Night!

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