Meaningfully build literacy skills while helping students feel connected to their school community with Our School Is a Family activities. Perfect for Back to School, students can write about their school and library, interview classmates, illustrate important members of their community, and work together to create a collaborative poster. Literacy activities including rhyming, parts of speech, alphabetizing, sentence building, poetry, and comprehension give students plenty of opportunities to read, write, think, and create. Along the way, they’ll discover how classmates, educators, librarians, and other school helpers each play a role in making school a place where everyone can belong.

As a result of the included activities, students will be able to:

• Create a collaborative banner!
• Design a shirt to show school spirit!
• Describe our school.
• Write about the library.
• Illustrate members of our school community.
• Complete sentence starters.
• Create an acrostic poem about family.
• Alphabetize words from the story.
• Interview a classmate.
• Play ‘odd word out’.
• Sort rhyming and non rhyming pairs.
• Sort parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives).
• Apply Writing Skills with included writing templates and prompts.>
• Practice Reading Comprehension with included discussion questions for the beginning, middle, and end of the book.
• Engage in Social Skills with included whole group prompts and activities.
• Develop Fine Motor Skills with included coloring, tracing, cutting, and gluing activities.
• Think critically about their school.
• Use digital tools to reorder sentences.

With Our School is a Family> activities, students strengthen literacy skills while building the connections that can turn a classroom, and an entire school, into a community.

💙 There’s room for everyone in your school family with learning activities that build literacy while helping students connect, collaborate, and celebrate their community.

💙 After downloading the Our School Is a Family activities, bring everyone together for the story with the Novel Effect soundscape and make your Back to School read-aloud extra welcoming.

About the Book and Soundscape

School is more than classrooms. It’s a whole community of people helping students learn, grow, and feel supported. That community to life with recurring musical themes, lively student voices, and familiar school-day chatter that makes every page feel bustling and welcoming.