Well, our first full week together has come to an end; however, our journey has just begun. I am so thrilled with my little class this year! I am very blessed and honoured to be teaching such lovely children and to have the opportunity to share in their learning experiences. One of the reasons I enjoy first grade so much is due to the fact that even the smallest learning experiences are filled with excitement and joy. First graders come to school with smiles of anticipation and expectations for each day. I love seeing their eyes widen when they discover something new, and huge smiles when they meet new learning goals.
Our first few days of school were very busy. On day one, the children were presented with a magic ball of dough. The tag that went along with the dough told how, if it changed colour when they squeezed it, they would have a great year. Well of course, every single ball magically changed before their eyes and the whole class erupted with cheers. What a great kick-off to the year!
We spent a great deal of time learning about each other, our favourite things, and our names. We counted the letters in our names and made a class graph. We looked at who had the shortest name and the longest. We then continued by discussing consonants and vowels. We counted how many vowels and consonants were in their names and again charted our learning.
We made time each day to talk about rules and responsibilities. We talked about school rules and then made some class expectations. We used the book "No, David" by David Shannon as our literature connection. We then created David portraits and displayed some of the rules we learned in speech bubbles. This great idea came from the FirstGradeWow blog page (Thanks for sharing a wonderful lesson!). The children loved their creations and I have to admit, they turned out very cute!
Overall, we have been very busy bees in room 109 and I can't wait to see what is ahead for us! Keep posted to view our learning adventures! This week we will be focusing on skip counting by 10's and 5's, one-to-one correspondence counting, graphing, and patterning. Our themes will be based around apples and weather/seasons.
Our first few days of school were very busy. On day one, the children were presented with a magic ball of dough. The tag that went along with the dough told how, if it changed colour when they squeezed it, they would have a great year. Well of course, every single ball magically changed before their eyes and the whole class erupted with cheers. What a great kick-off to the year!
The first day of school can always bring with it a case of the jitters. And in our class, we were no exception. We decided that we needed to do something to calm the butterflies in our tummies. This was our introduction to the story "First Day Jitters" by Julie Danneberg. This story told about the worries of what we believed to have been a child on their first day of school. By the end of the book, we come to realize that it was not a child after all, rather the teacher. The story brought out many giggles and opened up great lines of communication about how they were feeling. We then created our own "Jitter Juice" as a class and amazingly the jitters seemed to disappear. There was a unanimous thumbs up from the crowd over the taste (sorbet, Sprite, cream soda).
We spent a great deal of time learning about each other, our favourite things, and our names. We counted the letters in our names and made a class graph. We looked at who had the shortest name and the longest. We then continued by discussing consonants and vowels. We counted how many vowels and consonants were in their names and again charted our learning.
We made time each day to talk about rules and responsibilities. We talked about school rules and then made some class expectations. We used the book "No, David" by David Shannon as our literature connection. We then created David portraits and displayed some of the rules we learned in speech bubbles. This great idea came from the FirstGradeWow blog page (Thanks for sharing a wonderful lesson!). The children loved their creations and I have to admit, they turned out very cute!
Overall, we have been very busy bees in room 109 and I can't wait to see what is ahead for us! Keep posted to view our learning adventures! This week we will be focusing on skip counting by 10's and 5's, one-to-one correspondence counting, graphing, and patterning. Our themes will be based around apples and weather/seasons.
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