Give the Gift of TpT and Make it Festive!

Free TpT Holiday Gift Certificates

What's the very best gift you could give a teacher? That one's easy! A gift certificate to TeachersPayTeachers, of course! A TpT gift certificate is worth gold! Seriously! Being able to purchase top-notch teaching resources instead of having to create them yourself saves precious time, time you can spend over the holidays enjoying special moments with family and friends.

You can purchase a gift certificate for any amount between $5 and $500. Wow! Imagine what you could do with a $500 gift certificate! Click over to the TpT Gift Certificate page to take a look.

Usually when I send someone a gift certificate, I email it because all they need is the gift code to enter at checkout. However, during the holiday season, it's nice to be able to print a festive-looking gift certificate to include in a holiday greeting card.

So I created these two holiday gift certificates that you can give to your favorite educators. Well, first you have to purchase REAL gift cards and write a code on each certificate! As you probably guessed, these don't have any monetary value on their own. I knew you would want to customize them with your own fonts and messages, so I created an editable PowerPoint version. Did I mention that they are FREE? Just my little gift to you! You can download them from my TpT store.

Printing Tip - The colored portion of each certificate is 8 inches wide, so they should fit into a large greeting card envelope after you trim off the white border. When printing them, choose the "Shrink to Fit" option rather than choosing to print them to the edge of the paper. If they are still too wide, try reducing the scale to 95% or smaller.

Remember, if anyone asks you what YOU want for Christmas, be sure to tell them that all you want for Christmas is a TpT gift certificate! Hope your winter holiday is fabulous and that you enjoy time with the special people in your life!

Team Formation Tips for Smooth Sailing into the New School Year!

Smooth Sailing Into a New School Year 

I'm excited to be linking up with some of my favorite grade 3-6 bloggers who are sharing our best tips to help you sail into the the new school year. At the end of this post, you'll find 19 more blogs to visit and they all have terrific ideas to help you get off to a great start!

Team Formation Tips to Start the Year
If you use cooperative learning in your classroom, you might have questions about the most effective way to form teams and when you should begin to seat your students in teams. Here are some tips that worked well for me. You can find a more comprehensive explanation and answers to many more questions about team formation on my Team Formation Tips page on Teaching Resources.

• Optimal Team Size - Teams of 4 are by far the best size because you can easily divide them into 2 sets of pairs for partner work. Also, in a team of three, one student tends to feel left out, and teams that have more than four students tend to get off task easily.  
• Team Composition - As much as possible, I formed teams with students of mixed ability and from different ethnic backgrounds. I wanted my students to learn to appreciate others who were not like themselves, and to be exposed to different types of thinking and values. The best way to do that was to assign them to mixed teams rather than letting them choose their teams.  
• Desk Arrangement - I loved using the desk arrangement shown in the illustration above. I called it the T-Table arrangement, with the two students at the top of the "T" facing the front of the room while the other two are facing each other. You can find other team seating arrangements on my Seating Options page. 
• When to Start - I always started my students in teams right from the first day because I wanted them to learn that this is how we operate. Cooperative learning wasn't just for special activities, and they needed to learn now to get along right from the start. 
• Mix 'Em Up the First Three Days - I created new teams every day for the first three days so that my kids would get to know everyone and so I could observe them as they worked together. Each morning after they were reseated, we started the day with a teambuilder like Team Talk or Team Interview. You'll find these strategies and more on my Caring Classrooms page on Teaching Resources. After the first three days, I was ready to create more permanent teams that lasted a month or more.

Be sure to visit all the blogs in the link up to discover more teaching tips to help you sail into the new school year!

An InLinkz Link-up