Happy August! There is no doubt many of us have been working at a feverish pitch to make our student learning environment just perfect for the new school year. The people at The Mailbox have asked me to share how I use Mailbox Gold in my classroom, and this month it’s all about birthdays!

One of the most important areas of the classroom is the student birthday recognition wall. Our little ones come to us as the center of their world. Everything we teach them, especially in the beginning, is related to their sense of “self”. We can convey the importance of their presence in our classroom community by celebrating the day they were born!

Guess who has tons of resources for birthdays. Mailbox Gold! It’s the perfect resource for ideas and materials to celebrate birthdays. When you enter the site, all you have to do is type Birthday in the search bar, as in the picture, and just look all of the possibilities! And this is only the top of the search screen!

For my birthday wall, I am using the cute little mouse and cupcake clip art from Mailbox Gold to identify the child with a birthday. (I keep two or three identifiers handy, since I have had two birthdays on the same day in some years. I place the mouse under the child’s headshot when it’s his/her birthday. Here is a mockup of my board:

 

On our calendar wall, student names and birthdates, made with the Mailbox Gold card maker tool are placed above the child’s birth month. Here is a sample of these cards:

There is also a great feature for creating your own birthday card for each child. I was delighted to see the little clown card, because it can be turned into one of my favorite types of birthday cards: a pop-up card! Just look!

As always, you can trust Mailbox Gold to have just the right standards based resource to make student birthdays connect with important skills. I plan to use

this rhyming resource when we celebrate our first birthday. Notice how the Curriculum Area and Standard are listed on the right hand side of the screen. Just finding this page makes me want to search for other rhyming activities! So many resources right at your fingertips!

However you choose to celebrate your student birthdays, you are sure to find a ton of time-saving resources with Mailbox Gold.

I hope you have a wonderful 2015-2016 school year!

Maggie