First Week Recap

After a long 9 day stretch, the weekend was welcomed with open arms!  4 days of inservice and prepping for the new year and 5 days with kids...I couldn't wait to sleep in!!

Regardless, our first week went great!  My kids are learning our routines and procedures quickly and have done a great job this week.  I think my favorite thing about this week was seeing how GREAT my kids were from 8 till about 10:30 and how their attention spans slowly dwindled for the rest of the afternoon!  They are just SO precious!

Since this week was entirely focused on establishing rules, routines, and building community, we did a lot of fun activities.  The kids all worked really hard and I was so impressed with them!

In the first days, I asked my class to help me create a list of things that were important to include in a class promise (This activity was part of the First Week Detective Packet).  I was so impressed with the list they created!  Here is Our Class Promise:

After creating our class promises, students created a book to review the Class Promise.  They were then given a 'HW assignment' to take their books home and share it with their parents and families and teach them about our class promise.  Parents even had a sign a form and return it to school!  

I think the students favorite activity from the week was the Learning About Our Teacher from the detective packet.  They had to hunt the room for index cards with the answers to questions about their teachers.  They worked so hard, and had so much fun and felt reallly cool to know lots of new things about their teacher!

Another project that was a big hit, was making their magnifying glasses for the bulletin board from the Detective Packet.  They had to create clues about themselves, put them on the glass, and behind the glass they put a picture of themselves.  It was really fun to try and solve the mystery of Who is who?!

After our 4 days of TRIBES training, we were ready to begin using the great strategies we learned in our classroom.  One thing I did with my kids was create Tribles..They are little fluffy guys who help describe our feelings.  First we talked about each feeling and then the students gave a color to each feeling.  It was SO cool to hear the explanations for their feeling color!  One student said "I colored my happy face yellow like the sun because when I am happy I feel like the shining sun!"

Aside from these activities, my students also completed Amy's Stickin' to a Great Year craftivity and her Stand Tall Molly Lou Mellon flowers!

I am really looking forward to this upcoming week, starting our Daily 5 Routine and moving into some basic Math Center Activities from Amy's Let's Get Started Unit.  This coming Friday, we have an Everyday Math Inservice and I am looking forward to getting more training on our Math Program before jumping into it!  Here is a quick look at my week 1 Daily 5 Lesson Plans.

More to come next week - Happy Week 2 (or whatever week you may be approaching!).


I am going to end this blog with a little 'my life' photo-op!  These are my 'kids'.  They have a pretty rough life!

Koala - the Princess!

Nevi - pre launching into the pool!  

Nevi - post launching in the pool!