All About Me: A Beginning of Year Thematic Unit Grades 1-3

I know its only June, and school just got out and your thinking ahhh summer is here! What am I going to spend all of my free time doing? Well, if you're like me and you have any down time... you start to think about school! I've been thinking about how I'm going to arrange my new classroom, how to decorated it and try many new organizational tricks and activities to try with my first graders. I'm very excited because we are moving into a brand new school next year! 
It just goes to show that no matter what's going on in your life, your teacher brain is still at work. 
So, if you are thinking about August and are wondering... hmmm I want to try some new ideas, I'd like to share what I do for my unit All About Me. I created a packet and here's some ideas.

All About Me Cover Page

Some craftivities that I do with my students are learning their initials. A lot of students do not know what their initials are, so we talk about it and then we do a craftivity. I read the book: A My Name is Alice. My students love this book and it makes them laugh!  Here is a picture of our initials: 

Initials Craftivity

The students use a white crayon to write their initials really big on the black construction paper and then pick two different colors of squares to make a pattern around the letters. You can have them use whatever pattern you want.

Another craftivity that we do is to make our family tree. I read the story: Me and My Family Tree. This story talks about different people in your family and how they are related.
Here's a picture of our family tree craftivity:

The students color and cut out their family and glue it onto the tree.

I also have a theme center in my classroom where I change my theme out every two weeks. Here's my All About Me theme center:  

My students get to visit my theme center and learn about their emotions, 5 senses, sharing, learning their phone number, families and also get to read All About Me stories. 


In math, we graph many, many different things: 
Our Names
Our Hair Color
Our Eye Color
Our Fingerprints
How We Get Home
Our Birthdays

Here are some of the graphs that I use in my classroom: 

I use different templates for each graphing activity. This is the template I use for the students to color their types of fingerprints and graph on my chart: 

This is the template I use after the whole class has graphed their fingerprints and we record our data. They cut it out and glue into their math notebook. 

In poetry, I have All About Me poems... of course! We have a focus poetry notebook that we glue our poems into. Here are two examples: 

When we talk about the 5 senses, I pop popcorn and we use it to experience sight, smell, taste, touch and hear. This is the template that I created for the students to fill out and glue into their science notebook. This is so much fun for the students! I mean, who doesn't LOVE popcorn! And what better way to explore our 5 senses! 

I hope you got some great ideas to use at the beginning of the school year! If you enjoyed some of these, then check out my All About Me Thematic unit below on TPT. 

All About Me Thematic Unit Grades 1-3

Love, 
Kara

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