The Mailbox Blog » Help for Busy Teachers

My first two years of teaching were spent in a first-grade classroom. If you know first graders, you know that I was one happy lady. You also know that I was one busy lady! Why was I so busy? I needed to keep those first graders busy! Whew!

Of course, I didn’t want my students doing just anything. I wanted them learning while they were working. When I look at the new Learning Mats series from The Mailbox® Books, I wish it had been available when I was searching for grade-one resources. Its no-fuss preparation quickly provides fun skill reinforcement for small groups. But here’s the best news about the series—not only is there a literacy book and a math book for grade one, but there are also literacy and math books just for kindergarten and just for preschool!

Each book has all you need to work with small groups of students: pull-out color mat sets, teacher and student cards, teaching activities, and assessment pages. You’ll be able to address different learning abilities, and the preparation is minimal!

Check out this colorful mat from the preschool Math Learning Mats book. It’s one of four garden-themed mats. You can pair it with any set of cards from the book, but I’ve chosen some of the cards from the “Modeling Numbers” unit.

Here’s one of the six playful dinosaur-themed mats from the kindergarten Literacy Learning Mats book. There are 24 mats in the book in four different designs. The cards shown can be used with any mat set in the book to boost your students’ color-word skills.

If you work with first graders, don’t miss this treasure of a mat from the grade one Math Learning Mats book. If you’d like, use mats in the treasure mat set with these colorful cards to introduce or review fractions with a small group of students.

As an added bonus, each book includes reproducible assessment pages, such as this one on fractions from the grade one math book, for each skill your students practice using their cards and learning mats.

If you’re busy with younger children, be sure to add the books from the Learning Mats series to your collection. You can quickly put these activities together to reinforce important skills and still have time to get busy with something else!