First 2 Weeks!

Hey friends! Long time no blog!! Let me just tell you, the first couple weeks of being a first grade teacher were surprising!! Overwhelming, exciting, stressful, frustrating, memorable, and fun! 

Let's just start from the beginning! Back to school night was a blast! I had my room mostly complete and lots of surprises for kids and parents on their desks! I had a night before school poem and "ready confetti", a treat for kids, "What will my child be learning in first grade" sheet, and an info sheet parents filled out and gave back to me! The kids were shy, but had fun looking around their new classroom!

Here is a peek at my room!

The first two weeks of school we really focused on community building and learning the expectations for first grade! We still have a long way to go with learning our rules and how to follow them, but were getting better everyday! Here are some of the fun activities we've completed so far!

My outside bulletin board is based off of "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. We read the book and talked about how we can be more giving and why that is important to our classroom community! They did awesome with some of these!!

We also read the book "Lacey Walker Non-stop Talker" by Christianne Jones. This book led us in discussion on why it is important to be a good listener. This is something we'll be working on for a while :)

P.s. Lacey walker is an owl!

Today we worked on our ability to work in groups by completing a 24 piece puzzle in groups of 4. This was so good for them! We talked about what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like to be apart of a group, then tried it out! I had a few kids shed some tears because they were frustrated with the group! It is a hard skill for my firsties, but in the end we had some great discussions and everyone finished their puzzle! :)

Today we also decided that for our class pet, we will "adopt" an animal from the Louisville Zoo! The kids were sooooo excited, and I had to explain many times that they are not sending us an actual zoo animal! I let the kids look through the list of animals up for adoption, and they all voted and chose a Siberian Tiger! Next week we will have many discussions about tigers, we will name ours, and do a few writing activities based on our new friend. Our tiger will go home with a different student every weekend so that the students can come back on Monday and share with us what they did through writing and speaking! It will be a fun project for them! 

Also, this week I finally got my very own name plate next to my door! Exciting stuff :)

Next week we will continue to build our classroom community, start our montessori work plans, and do a fun unit were we will be studying our names!! I can't wait! :)