No Shhing Here

As an introvert, I'm not a giant fan of icebreaker/get to know you activities that require awkward conversations with people you don't know. I'm not the only one - plenty of students feel the same way! Last year I came up with a beginning of school activity that introduces content, allows me to learn about each student, and begins to establish classroom community connections— AND it's cringe free! :) Our kids really enjoy this activity - there's lots of opportunity to be creative and it's culturally relevant with its video game tie-in. No Cringe Icebreakers In this activity, You: The Video Game , students share the things that make them unique and learn about their classmates' lives, but there's no uncomfortable conversations. Instead, students pretend their lives have been turned into a video game. They create a "screenshot" of their imaginary video game that includes 10 symbols, and write a bit of text to explain the meaning behind each symbo

  I recently spent two weeks with a colleague that works at the elementary level. She'd just completed the most amazing project, organizing her nonfiction books into easily browsable genres. I love creating graphics, so with her input, I designed shelf labels and signs for 78 different nonfiction genres and 11 fiction genres.  If you'd like to purchase these genre labels and signs, you can buy them via my Teachers Pay Teachers store. The resource includes 78 nonfiction and 11 fiction labels in two different sizes: 8.5" x 11" and 2" x 4".  For a quick crash course in creating your own labels, keep reading! The first thing you're going to need is a  Canva account , preferably a Pro account or an Education account, to ensure you have access to ALL the photographs. Remember, education accounts are FREE for K-12 teachers. With Canva open, you'll click on "Custom Size" in the upper right hand corner, and then enter your dimensions. In my examp

I decided this summer that it was time to overhaul my library genre signs. We have signage in place, but you can't read the labels from across the library, and they're just words - no images to support the text.  I looked for pre-made genre signs, but everything felt elementary or boring, and I was looking for something with a little more style. To meet my needs, I ended up creating a set of my own genre posters for the following 15 sections: horror, sci fi, comics & manga, realistic fiction, adventure, teen, thriller, poetry, romance, historical fiction, mystery, sports, fantasy, humor, and classics.  If you're short on time, and you want to purchase these pre-made genre signs as a printable PDF file,  they're in my TPT store.   The PDF gives you access to 15 different genres, along with a second set of signs that includes a description of the genre on each sign, for a total of 30 signs. Here's what the signs look like with added genre descriptions: I'm goi