I am so excited to say that the newly-revamped Page Protector Printables Bundle 1 is NOW the Bright Beginning Binder!

I will share about how we’re using this resource below, and I hope you might see some ideas you could use in your own homeschool or classroom!

Here’s a peek of my students hard at work in their Bright Beginning Binders with our beautiful bulletin board in the background and our Word Work board to their right!

I am so excited about our new Bulletin Board. It includes our Calendar Time area, a Where Am I? area where I’ll do some gentle instruction in geography, and finally the Math Minute where for now I have some coin posters that I printed 4 to a page for use of a compact space. You can find this awesome resource for FREE at Leanne Price’s TpT store.

My favorite part of this board is the LOW COST of this very versatile learning space! I used FREE paint strips (THAT WERE GIVEN TO ME BY A PAINT REP. who said they were outdated color names and were going to be throw away :)), part of a map I didn’t need anymore, math vocabulary strips I got for 50 cents last year at dollar*tree to border the Math Minute section.

Total cost: a few dollars for printing and laminating a few things mostly in black-and-white and the 50-cent pack of math vocabulary strips (which I will rotate through the year). I also found the states and capitals strips pack at dollar*tree last year. They were just stuck in a cabinet, so now I’m using them for purposeful learning!

My Build•A•Calendar resource, which is part of the Bright Beginning Bundle includes the titles you see on this board: Calendar Time, Today’s Number, Day of the Week, Month and Year. I put mine on colored cardstock before laminating just to dress them up and add some color! I then used a border of repurposed paint strips to separate our Calendar Board from our Math Minute and Where Am I? spaces. I hope to share more about our Bulletin Board in another post, but I wanted to be sure and point out those titles are included as well as the larger months, year, date and days cards that match the smaller version in the student binder!

This is the Build•A•Word resource, which is one of the 3 resources included in the Bright Beginning Binder. It is quite simple really! The students can use the letter cards to build words. Today, we talked about the vowel blend AY and what it says. We also revisited the saying that when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking.

Here my 7-year-old student is building her Calendar in the 9 pockets of her page protector. The card she is inserting is one of the counting cards. Three different styles of counting cards are included: base ten blocks, tally marks and ten frames. In addition, coin cards are included as well. All of these cards come in amounts from 1 to 31 so the student can put counting and coin cards in for the day of the month. This is where differentiation is so possible: give your students whichever set of cards is most appropriate.

Below you can see a completed Calendar page. In addition to the cards you can see, there are also 7 other card options to use interchangeably in the page protector:

• Days of the week

• Today’s weather

• Fill-in-the-blank yesterday, today, tomorrow

• Today I Want to …

• Fill-in-the-blank Today is … and Today’s Date is …

• Coin Cards (99 total combinations for values 1¢–31¢)

• A My Pocket Calendar title card

In addition to the Build•A•Calendar resource and the Build•A•Word resource, the Bright Beginning Binder bundle also includes my Make•A•Number resource!

Today’s Tip: Don’t put away those magnetic letters just yet! Even if your students know all the letter sounds and names, you can put those magnetic letters to use for word work. If you plan to use them a lot, you might consider giving each of your students their own set or having several available in your word work center!