We Did It!

What a great opening and first week of school!  The kids came in so excited to learn, which was great, because we got right down to business after some fun preliminary getting to know you activities.  Students went on classmate scavenger hunts and learned more about me and my family.  We also made posters about what we did over the summer.  We established some rules and procedures to set up our classroom community.  Thank you to all parents who got emergency cards and other information back to me so quickly.

We began writing in our journals by answering a prompt about the characteristics of the perfect teacher, began doing daily oral language, read and answered comprehension questions on some non-fiction texts about the rain forest, and read some wonderful stories:  If Everybody Did, First Day Jitters, Have You Filled a Bucket?, and The Witches.  Next week we will begin working in guided reading groups and will begin establishing our reader's workshop model so students can begin to choose books from our classroom library and read independently.

We jumped right into Writer's Workshop, learning how to generate ideas for our own narrative stories, and how to create mental movies in our readers' minds.  Students also completed their first On Demand writing piece in class.  Please make sure all students have their pictures to decorate their notebooks on Tuesday, so we can work on this in class.

In math, we began our official curriculum after we made "Me By Numbers" posters where students had to follow a rubric to design a poster relating various numbers to their daily lives.  We started our first math module on multiplication, beginning with learning how to multiply by 2's.  

We also began our unit on rocks and minerals in science by making an interactive RAN (Reading and Analyzing Non-Fiction) chart and watching a short video about minerals.

Students did an excellent job during our first fire drill of the year on Thursday, too!  The best fire drill EVER!

Thank you for sharing your children with me this year!  They are absolutely adorable, witty, and great to work with.  I'm so looking forward to a great year!!!

IMPORTANT!! 

I've received very few email addresses from parents so that I can privatize the blog.  Please send me your email address this week, so I can add it to my list of contacts and send out the invitations to the blog and make it private for Room 29 parents' eyes only.  THANK YOU!!  I'd like to share photos of your children and their work, but I can't do so unless the blog is private, and I want to ensure that everyone has access.

I will be contacting everyone this week and next by phone to say hello and let you know how your child adjusted to the first week of school.