Great Resource: I Love That Teaching Idea

When I taught sixth grade, one of my favorite resources for creative ideas to use in the classroom was I Love That Teaching Idea. It is a website where teachers submit their creative teaching ideas for others to use. Some even include printable worksheets and forms! The ideas are divided into categories so you can easily locate an idea for any subject!

Here are a couple of example ideas from the Social Studies category

World Map Skills–For a take-home assignment in my class, I make a copy of a world map for each student. The assignment is to look through the yellow pages of a phone book and make a list of all the ethnic restaurants in our area. Then they are to plot on the map where the country is that this food was originated.

The ABC’s of My Great State–At the beginning of a study of your state, have your students keep an “ABC” book that they can add to thoughout your unit. Simply staple or bind 26 pages, each with a letter of the alphabet placed on the page. As students learn about the state bird, for example, they can go to that page in their book and draw a picture of it. Students continue to add to their books until it is full. Title it, “The ABC’s of My Great State!” Older students could even go and share their books with a younger class.

Ancestor Party-Plan a class party where the students each come as an ancestor of theirs. They can wear costumes, and each will tell the rest of the class a little bit about the person they are dressed as. Previous to the party there are activities that can be done, such as writing about the person they will be. We have had students come as a flapper, Butch Cassidy, an Indian, a mom, etc. It was lots of fun.

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply