Take Home Book Bags with a freebie!

Well, it’s our first full week of school and I’m feeling really great about this school year! At the end of last week, we had lots of boxes delivered to our room and they were full of the Fountas & Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention Green System (Levels A-J).  It’s a set of 110 leveled readers with lessons, a writing book and take home books. This is only some of what comes with this huge, amazing kit!

Yesterday I posted a pic on Instagram of this kit and got lots of great comments from other teachers saying how much they love this intervention system which made me even more excited to use it! I’ll be using these materials in combination with my own materials which I know will help my little friends become successful readers and writers.

I’m linking up with the amazing Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper for her Tried it Tuesday linky with one particular part of this pack- the Take Home Book Bags.  I am so pumped for these take home book bags (and the books) so that my little friends will be able to practice reading at home too which lots of them do not have many books at home, so this is a hugely necessary component.

The Take Home Books are in B&W but the readers for the classroom are in color.

I’m so excited to try out these take home book bags this year that match the books we will be reading in our guided reading groups.  This extra practice will hopefully help my little friends progress a little quicker and help them love reading even more since they’ll have books to read at home that are at their level! I love the sturdy little bags that are provided to take the books home, but I wanted to add some fun labels to the bags and to the spot where students will be grabbing their new book of the day/week, so I created these fun chevron number tags.  I went with numbers for these labels (instead of numbers) because my groups change often enough and this way I can easily just have my new little friends get their bags with a new number.  This way the bags will be all set no matter if my little friends switch out of my group.

I’m going to try having students bring back their book bag each day.  They will then take out their book from the night before and grab their new book from the little red case next to their number (and then put it right in their book bag). They can then place their old book from the night before back in their number spot in the red case.  This will not only give my little friends new books to read regularly at home, but also they will be able to take ownership of their book and make sure to bring it back each day (hopefully!).  I’m hoping this plan will work- I’ll be trying it out very soon. 🙂

I organized all the Take Home Books by lesson number so that I can easily grab them and set them in the right spot in the red stand before each group comes into the classroom. Everything is set up right next to each other which will hopefully make this all go smoothly!

There are so many Take Home Books, these little containers are all full now!  I took this pic before I finished organizing them all. 🙂

All ready to send the books home!

I know I never do any number/math freebies or products since I’m all about reading (and since Amanda rocks those math ideas), but I made these numbers go up to 30 so you can use them in your classrooms as well for whatever reason you can find (labels, counting cards, etc.)! You can download them here!

Thanks so much to Holly for hosting this great weekly linky! Hope everyone’s school year is off to a great start as well. 🙂