All About me is such a fun topic for young learners! I love diving into this theme with my students because they are always so excited to participate. After all, young children are experts on themselves and love sharing facts and favorites of their own. If you’re looking for fun, hands-on activities for an all about me theme, you’ve come to the right place!
One of my favorite topics at the beginning of the new school year is All About Me. It’s such a great way for students to get to know each other. It also helps to ease any nerves because generally students are happy to talk about themselves. However, this theme can be used any time of the year and has great ties to kindergarten science and social studies concepts.
If you’ve never taught an All About Me unit in your classroom, I highly recommend giving it a go. My favorite way to teach this topic is with lapbooks. Want to see all of our activities? Come along as I share my favorites!
First Off, What’s a Lapbook?
As I mentioned, I LOVE using lapbooks not only for All About Me but just about any topic or unit in my classroom. If you’re new to lapbooks, also called “Flippy Flaps” around here, let me explain! Lapbooks are a smaller version of an interactive notebook that contains a variety of fun, interactive activities centered around a specific theme. All of the foldables and paper components from our lessons are neatly tucked inside a file folder as a way for students to document their learning in one handy place.
My students LOVE making lapbooks! These are such fun activities to include since they provide a ton of hands-on learning and are fully customizable. Students will add a component to their lapbook each day until we have a full finished product.
Preparing a lapbook is really easy. At the beginning of the year, I help students with the folding, but it isn’t long before they can prep their own lapbooks.
Introduce The Topic of All About Me
If you teach young children, it’s probably safe to say you own lots of great books! I love children’s literature and I especially love books that make great read-alouds. Group reading is a chance to connect with my students, promote new ideas and provide a common foundation that we can refer back to as a class.
This is why I love introducing new topics with read alouds. There are lots of great books that are perfect for introducing an All About Me unit. Some of my favorites include:
- I Like Me! By Nancy Carlson
- Marvelous Me By Lisa Marie Bullard
- There’s Only One You By Kathryn Heling
- Incredible You By Rhys Brisenden
Choosing a variety of fun books with an “All About Me” theme is a great opener to your lapbook activities. Before we get started with our lessons, I always read a few of these books and make sure to have some similar titles available in our classroom library for students to look at independently.
Make An All About Me Self Portrait
After reading some books to kick off our lesson, I like to start our lapbooks by working on a self-portrait and discussing some of our unique features. This is a great time to point out that we can have different hair colors, eye colors, and skin colors while still being very similar.
An All About Me unit is a great time to celebrate diversity in your classroom, so be sure to touch on this during your lessons! It’s also a great time to pull out the multi-cultural crayon boxes by Crayola. Give students an opportunity to match their skin color to the crayons to find their color for the self-portrait.
For this activity, I provide my students with a blank “person” shape and allow them to add in the details.
These portraits are the perfect way to decorate the cover of their lapbook when students have finished. It’s always so fun to see how children represent themselves in drawings!
I also like to have students fill in some of their personal information such as eye color, hair color, age, birthday, and grade. It is also a great time to have them add their “My Name” section to their lapbook.
Discuss Favorite Things
Next up, I love to include a section where students can list out some of their favorite things. This is such a fun activity to do at the beginning of the year when you are first getting to know your new students. There are so many great things you can highlight for this activity, but I love to ask students about their favorites:
- Animal
- Toy
- Color
- Subject
- TV Show
- Game
- Book
- Movie
- Sport
To differentiate based on skill level, students can write these answers on their own or you can write them and allow students to trace them.
If you want to expand on this activity, you could have your students each share one thing from their list during your morning meeting or group circle time. Giving children opportunities to share during All About Me week is such a great way to help students make connections with each other and celebrate their unique personalities.
Celebrate Families For All About Me
We have to talk about families during an All About Me unit! I find that my students are often pretty excited to share about their families. For this topic, I LOVE having my students make their family tree for their lapbooks. This might be my favorite part of the whole book!
Students will color and cut out their own tree trunk shapes and then draw pictures or write names of families on leaf shapes. Then they can glue their tree and leaves down in their lapbook for an adorable display of family members. I like to encourage children to include as many family members as they would like in this, so plan to have a little extra time for this activity.
If you are worried about whether students will be able to do this on their own you can solicit help from their parents. A few days before this activity, send home a note (or the page of leaves) and ask parents to help fill in the names of family members. Then in class, students can add a picture and/or color in the leaves.
Afterward, I have students share their family trees with the class one by one. This is a great opener to a discussion about family diversity and how families can look different for everyone. In addition, I also incorporate the book Our Class is a Family by Shannon Olsen during this time. This book is such a great way to help students understand that our classroom should act as their “second family” and support each other throughout the year.
Incorporate Digital All About Me Activities
During the first week of school especially, it’s a good idea to have a few extra activities to pull out just in case! Even if you are doing an all about me theme at a different point in the year, it never hurts to have a few extra tricks up your sleeve! Digital options offer a great way to continue working on All About Me activities in a new format.
I love using digital activities as we introduce technology centers in the classroom. The digital activities I like to use feature many of the same topics in an interactive format.
Students will love answering questions about their families, friends, and favorite things in the digital version of these All About Me activities.
Digital lapbooks also make great homework, distance learning activities, or an assignment for students who were absent during the class lesson. Incorporating technology into your All About Me plans will round out your lessons and bring this unit full circle!
More All About Me Activities
One of the best things about lapbooks is that you get to choose what you want to highlight and include! In addition to the pieces we used for our All About Me Lapbooks, I have a variety of other options that can be swapped out. Some of the other things we have included in the past are:
- When I Grow Up Writing Prompt
- How Old I Am
- My Favorite Foods
- Words to Describe Me
- My New Friends
If you decide to make lapbooks for All About Me, you can pick and choose which topics to focus on with your students. Including a variety of topics makes them a wonderful, special keepsake for parents to look back on! Be sure to check out the bundle of both printable and digital All About Me Lapbook activities and then get ready to fill those lesson plans!
Looking For More Lapbook Activities?
Are you in love with lapbooks too? I have found them to be such a great addition to my lessons, especially for kindergarten and 1st grade students. They really are such a wonderful way to touch on a variety of topics within one larger theme. I use lapbooks for just about everything in my room, so if you’re interested in checking some of my other favorites out, be sure to peek at the following blog posts:
- Back To School Lapbook Activities
- Apple Lapbook Activities
- Insect Lapbook Activities
- Weather Lapbook Activities
No matter what you’re studying in your classroom, lapbooks are a great way to engage your learners in hands-on activities!
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Don’t forget to pin this post to your classroom Pinterest board so that you will be all set for your All About Me unit in your classroom!
