Day 5

One week ago today we started first grade! How the time has flown. Today on our fifth day of school we worked more on our routines, expectations, and daily schedule, fitting in time for reading, writing, and math, as well as our first theme of the year. In first grade we have several thematic units including life cycles, solids and liquids, mapping, weather, etc. Before we kick off our official theme units of study we always focus on the theme "All About Me" where we learn about ourselves, each other, and becoming a community in our first grade classroom. Today we started this unit with a scavenger hunt focused on learning about classmates. In the photos below you will see students mingling to answer questions on their scavenger hunt such as, "find someone who can count to 100," "find someone who speaks another language," or "find someone who has the same color hair that you do." We also started our self portrait project, which is my favorite art project of the year and goes beautifully with our "All About Me" unit. In the photos below you will see students painting the backgrounds for their portraits and you will see two examples of portraits from last year (my portrait and one done by a former student). I am enjoying taking and posting photos from class each day (and I hope you are enjoying them too) but after this week I will plan to blog about once a week rather than daily. Please keep checking in with the blog for new posts, photos, upcoming dates, important information, and much more!

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Our Fourth Day of School

It is already the end of our fourth day in first grade and we are doing such a great job learning our routines, practicing using materials, helping each other, and learning to do reading, writing, and math work! Today we read a book called, The Best Place to Read then students wrote pages for a class book, this one titled, "Our Favorite Places to Read" (last week we wrote pages for a class book called "My Summer Vacation." We also did writing related to our word study "mystery name of the day" game. It is wonderful to see how the first graders are remembering to stretch out the words they want to spell then writing down the sounds they hear. That is a very important step in learning to write and I am so proud to see everyone in our class working hard at it! Today we did more practice using and caring for the books our classroom library and students are quickly learning where to find their favorite authors and titles in the room! At the end of the day, during math, we have been working on number sense as we discuss the number of the day (today's number is 4 since it is the 4th day of school) and we will add more to this process as we learn more and more about numbers. So far we are representing the number of the day with tallies, place value, coins, written out in word form, and we are identifying one more and one less than the number. As the year goes on we will add in determining if the number is odd or even, recording the numbers that are 10 more and 10 less, writing equations to represent the number, and writing numbers greater than and less than our number. We work on "Number of the Day" as our warm up for math each day and this is one way that we work on building "number sense," or a more complete understanding of numbers in first grade. Below are some photos from today!

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Day 3!

Today, on our third day of school, our class continued learning and practicing routines and care of our materials. We explored some new math materials and play things, and we started practicing care of our books. The students have been looking at books daily and we have read a couple books aloud each day but today we really took the time to start getting into our classroom library! We also continued our review of consonants, vowels, letter sounds, and stretching out words to spell as we played the Mystery Name Game. This year I plan to add more purposeful work with tricky vocabulary words into reading instruction so today we did our first activity to give this a try. I identified the words "envious," scarcely," and "informed," on chart paper, then read aloud the book Chrysanthemum and had the students identify when they heard these words come up in the story. When we found one of the words we re-read the sentence it was in, decided on kid friendly definitions or synonyms for the word, and wrote them on our chart. We then tried the sentence, trying it interchangeably with the new word and one of its synonyms, making sure it made sense both ways. We will add these new words to a chart in class and keep adding interesting new vocabulary to it as we learn more throughout the year! Below are some photos of today's activities. Have a wonderful long weekend and see you Tuesday!

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First Day of School Photos

We just finished a wonderful first day of first grade in room 5! We had our first music class of the year, started to learn our classroom routines, and explored some classroom writing and math materials. We also read a couple of good "first day" books including The Kissing Hand and First Day Jitters. First Day Jitters is a funny book about a girl who does not want to start her first day at a new school and has lots of jittery feelings about it. The part that always makes everyone laugh is the last page when we find out that the person who is afraid to go to her first day of school is actually the teacher! We discussed how we can all feel jittery and nervous so we read a poem about "Jitter Juice" that will take away the jitters, then tried a bit of the juice! Kids will be bringing home the poem and their recipe today. Below are some photos from the day. I have lots more great photos from today but am waiting to receive all students' blog permission slips. Please make sure to send in signed blog permission slips as soon as possible so that I can keep posting photos. I will take more tomorrow!

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Second Day of School

Today, on our second day of school, we learned more about our classroom routines and materials, and did lots of writing! We created pages for a class book called, "What I Did on Summer Vacation," and we started our Mystery Name of the Day books. Mystery Name of the day is a favorite activity at the beginning of the school year in first grade! I secretly choose a student of the day then, as a class, we use what we know about letter sounds and spelling to guess which student it is. The we spell the student's name, scramble the letters and practice putting them back in order, "interview" the student about a few of his/her favorite things and create pages for a book called, "My New Friends." Today Piper was the mystery student of the day so everyone created a book page about Piper with a drawing of her, her name, age, favorite food, and favorite activity. Tomorrow we will have a different mystery student of the day and on and on until everyone has had a turn! At the end of our activity (so in about 18 days) each student will have their own self-written book with a page about each classmate! Below are some great photos from today!

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First Day of School Tomorrow!

I hope that you are all getting excited for the first day of school tomorrow! I know I am! Families, please remember to send your child to school tomorrow with a backpack including snack/lunch, a water bottle, and their green folder (if you picked it up at our Meet'n Greet or Open House -- if not it will come home for the first time tomorrow). Please also remember to send in any signed forms received in either your summer letter or the green folder, especially the blog permission slip (so that I can start posting photos of our class on this blog tomorrow afternoon)! Please remember, I will not post photos of the children until I receive their signed blog permission slips so please remember to send those in. The kids always love seeing themselves on the blog and I know that you will love seeing them too! See you (at least the kids) tomorrow morning! I am looking forward to a great year!

Welcome Back to School!

It's hard to believe but it is almost time to start another year  of school at UMS! I have been working hard to get our  classroom ready for the beginning of the year and am very  excited to see all of you soon! The other first grade teachers  and I hope that you will join us at one or both of our  upcoming events before the school year starts! This is a great  way to meet your teacher and your new classmates and take  home some important information about the start of the  school year. The two first grade events are... 8/21/2014 6:30 PM 1st grade popsicle social  (this will be held on the playground if the weather is good or  in the cafeteria if there is rain)

8/26/2014 8:00 AM 1st and 2nd grade open house  (this will be held in the classroom so you can check out our  room before school starts!) I hope to see you there!