Just for Fun: Custom Coloring Pages

 During winter months (December Chaos, Testing Season, Seasonal Affective Disorder), there's a big need to unwind and co-regulate with students. During these months, I turn to fun and relaxing videos, various noise frequencies, and coloring pages (for both myself, and for those I serve!).

Did you know you can create customized coloring pages from images you take? Crayola does the work for you, and it's actually quite easy. Just go here. You don't have to set up an account or anything (thank goodness), and you just upload an image and then have Crayola turn it into a printable coloring page for you! 

For example, here's a photo I took of Mrs. Spina reminding students of one of their mantras - I CAN DO HARD THINGS! I just did a Word Art insert on a Google Doc, made the borders of the words super thick, printed it out, snapped a pic, and it's ready to upload! 

Here's the original image of me (simplest backgrounds work best): 

And here's what good ole' Crayola gave me: 

Easy, right? 

If you're doing calming stations or even sending students home with fun packets, this may be a fun addition. 






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Language Proficiency Tool for Teachers

Image
 One of the most popular posts from my former blog (Innovative EL) was this- so I knew I had to get it back up and available for folks on my new blog!  This tool is based on WIDA performance descriptors. It is meant to serve as a starting place for educators who may not be as familiar with supports and scaffolds for multilingual learners. Each page features one proficiency level (printed twice: so page one has Level 1 at the top and also at the bottom for easy printing). Please note that these are based on general composite scores, and not on language domain scores. Ready to access the tool? Click here!  A deeper look into each individual students' scores (which I absolutely recommend providing to anyone who supports multilingual learners) can be found in the WIDA Name Charts (available on the WIDA website).   These charts are a fantastic resource that I'd recommend printing and giving to each classroom teacher, content teacher, social worker, psychologist, teaching assistant,
Read more

"I Need" Cards: Printables for Newcomers

Image
At the beginning of the school year, I always encourage folks to prep a ton of these in anticipation of newcomer students that will arrive throughout the school year. Please note that this is one example of a template. You can open the templates, go to FILE and MAKE A COPY so that you can customize these to better fit your needs! This sample template I have ready is for English/Spanish newcomers . I Need Cards - please note that this template has the same tool but presented a few different ways. These are a tool that I reference in my proficiency snapshot tool for classoom & content teachers (a scaffold I'd recommend for level 1 students). As students are beginning their language journeys in English, they may just feel comfortable raising their hand and pointing. As they grow in confidence and have had ample time to practice, they may say these sentences out loud. Here's a quick TikTok that walks through these. **I recently (9/10/23) used AI and digital translation resour
Read more

TableTop Tools (Inspired by TikTok)

Image
Create mini anchor charts and display them on small hanging rings. I first saw this idea from  TikTok user @teachwithheath_ . I love how these look and also how easy it is have multiple tools ready for students! I'm thinking this would be great for each content area, for example, so that all of the math tools for that unit are available to students in one spot.  Check out my first round of design . Please go to File and Make a Copy so that you can tweak these to fit your needs! I included specific sentence stems/frames for collaboration. These are laid out so that each page has two of the same, so that you could print two tools at a time. The size is set to match the Party City frames (these were only $2.50 each, but I'm sure local dollar stores have something similar). I also had a workshop participant share this set from Amazon !  I used a 2-inch binder ring, but I wish I would have purchased smaller rings.  I love how they turned out! By making these language tools availabl
Read more