Children's books with strong female characters

If you're thinking about stocking up your school/class library, be sure to include some books that have strong female role models. Here are my top picks!

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (by Elena Favilli):
One of the children in my class (a 7 year old) brought in this bestseller for Show and Tell this year. She spoke about it with such enthusiasm and many of the others in the class said that they have the same book and love it too. The book features famous, inspirational women from Queen Elizabeth to Serena Williams and many more strong role-models in between.







Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World: (by Rachel Ignotofsky):
Another bestseller, this book tells the stories of influential women in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) world. It is beautifully illustrated and very informative. Since its release it has received rave reviews from parents and teachers.






Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World (by Ann Shen):
In a similar fashion to Elena Favilli's "Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls", this book tells the story of many influential women throughout history such as Amelia Earhart, Cleopatra, Marie Curie and even Joan Jett, the godmother of punk. Again this is beautifully illustrated and presented in a way that is accessible to many age levels (though it may need to be read aloud to younger children).



Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World (by Kate Pankhurst):
This one is much more child friendly in terms of layout and illustrations than the above situations. The text is laid out in smaller chunks making it less intimidating to younger eyes! It has been tried and tested by several parents and teachers and it has been enjoyed by children as young as 4 or 5. This book features bright, engaging pages about strong female characters such as Anne Frank, Coco Chanel and Rosa Parks.

.....Aaaaaaand here are a few more for you to check out:

"Matilda" by Roald Dahl

"Pippi Longstocking" series by Astrid Lindgren

"Ronia the Robber's Daughter" by Astrid Lindgren

"The Princess in Black" series by Shannon and Dean Hale

"Zita the Spacegirl" series by Ben Hatke

"Island of the Blue Dolphins" by Scott O'Dell

Be sure to check out the jam-packed website, "A Mighty Girl" and The Guardian's list of 10 books featuring empowering female characters for lots more ideas!

Flash Freebie: Editable Folder Covers

Good morning!

I'm very excited to announce that I'm hosting a "Flash Freebie" giveaway today and tomorrow. For 48 hours only, these beautiful, editable folder covers will be free to download from my TPT store. When the 48 hours are up, the covers will cost $1 each. The Flash Freebie will run from 8:00GMT on Monday 14th August to 8:00GMT on Wednesday, 16th August. Of course, if you have the file, you can edit the text as you like - perhaps you want to use it as your own planning folder, maybe you want to create sections for your dip folder, or perhaps you want to use it for something that's not school related. The choice is yours! Click on the images below to go to the one you wish to download (or download them all!).

Quick note: I used a font called Billabong. As these are editable you'll have to choose your own fonts. If you want to know how to download pretty fonts, check out my tutorial.

Back to School Freebies 2017

Hi all,

Here at A Crucial Week lots of free resources have been shared over the years. Here are some of my favourite back to school freebies for you to download!

Enjoy!
Emer

As posted about last month, here is an editable international events calendar to help you to get organised!

I've used these parent reminder sheets the last two years and many parents have said that they find them very useful. This editable file contains 6 different colour versions of two different styles. If you don't want to waste ink printing them, you can always just save it as a PDF and email the file to the parents.

These question word posters allow for the children to help to create the classroom decor (which means a free lesson idea too!). I got the children in my class to write answers to each question in the blank space. You could also ask your students to write examples of questions that have the given word.

These welcome posters are available for free in my TPT store as Gaeilge or in English.

These WALT and WILF posters are great for sticking on your board to share lesson objectives or assessment criteria.

This poster is for a behaviour management technique that we have used for a number of years at my school. Each child's name is put in a cup. Every break time, you choose a name and secretly watch that child in the line. If they behave well, they get to put a star on a chart. If not, we don't tell them who the secret walker was but we explain why that person didn't get a star. I usually print the children's names on an A3 sheet to make the star chart and put the above poster on top.

A handy back to school/early finisher game that can be done individually or in small groups is Boggle. We often do it as a whole group activity in my classroom and try to beat our record. This version involves using bottle tops to make the letters. Read about how I use it and get the freebie in my blog post about it.

Want your class to love you instantly? Allow them to use fidget spinners in class, guided by these station cards. (If you're ready for this at the start of the school year, I commend you!)

When the children are doing collaborative tasks at the start of the school year, get them into the habit of reflecting on their behaviour. Here is a free reflection sheet to assess their peers. 

And here are some posters as Gaeilge from long, long ago!

Desk tidy made from old colouring pencils

 

After having some old colouring pencils pile up in a basket in my classroom, I decided I wanted to do something crafty with them. Naturally, a quick Pinterest search was in order and I really liked the idea of using them to make little containers for the sharpeners and erasers on the desks in my classroom. My colleagues were very forthcoming following my email request for pencils that were too short to use so I built up quite a few in the last month of school. 

I thought these would take a lot longer to make but the longest part was sorting the pencils into different coloured piles. After that it was quite quick, hot-gluing them on to plastic raspberry containers. I decided not to make them all the same length and I like the effect of having some shorter and some longer pencils in there. 

Here are a few pics of how I made them:

The longest part - sorting the colours!

The surprisingly quick gluing part!
(TIP: Put greaseproof paper on the surface where you use the hot glue gun - it peels off really easily and doesn't get too messy and sticky!)

Two of the finished containers!

TPT Back to School Sale - August 1st and 2nd

Great news!

Teachers Pay Teachers is having a site-wide sale on Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd August. 

It starts at 4:01am GMT (Irish time!) on 1st August and finishes at 3:59am GMT in the early hours of 3rd August.

I'm having 20% off everything in my TPT store. In addition to that, TPT is offering another 5% off when you use the promotional code BTS2017 at the checkout (Just make sure to select "Apply a Promo Code"). So you can save 25% on anything in my store!

I've created some new categories to help make browsing easier. The "Irish Classrooms" category is for anything that might be of interest to Irish teachers (and not stuff for international schools).
Then you'll also find these new custom categories on the top left:
Behaviour Management
MYP
PYP
Stationery

Happy shopping!

New IB Learner Profile and Key Concept Posters

Hello there!

A customer requested a big poster with all of the Learner Profile attributes and a set of posters with world flag borders. I also made French, Spanish and Chinese versions of the L.P. poster. Here's how they turned out!

If you're teaching in an IB school and there's a resource you'd like me to make, please be sure to let me know in the comments or on my FB page!

Click on any of the images below to get them in my TPT store.

International Events Calendar 2017-2018 (free download)

Hi all,

I recently put together a calendar with many celebrations during the 2017-2018 school year. It includes things like international events, major religious celebrations, commemoration days, World Book Day etc. Some of the events include links to websites about them. The calendar is editable so feel free to remove and add in what you like. Click here to download it for free from my TPT store.

Irish teachers, I strongly recommend you keep an eye out on Ciara Brennan on Twitter ( @PrimEdTeacher ) as she usually compiles a list that includes lots of Irish-specific events like GAA events, national science fairs, the Texaco art competition, etc.