Back To School

Back To School

Well, it is certainly nice to have a break from the heat!  The cooler air is much appreciated in school.  The kids have been doing a great job getting to know each other and the classroom.  We have spent a lot of time learning  routines and expectations for first grade as well as getting into our math, writing and reading curriculum.  I so proud of all that they have accomplished in this week!  

Math

We are implementing a new standards based math curriculum which is called EnVisions. This program has a lot of interactive web based activities that we will be using throughout the year.  There is a homework component with this as well.  I will be sending home parent letters to give you more information about this program.  For the first week we have been exploring the tools that we will be using in math as well a playing some games to review some concepts.  We learned the routines involved with using the tools and where our tools are stored.  

Classroom Rules

We also set up our classroom rules together.  We each decorated a piece of a puzzle with our names and some things that describe us.  We worked as a group to put the puzzle together.  When we finished we talked about what it took to be able to accomplish putting this puzzle together.  This is how we created a list of our rules to follow in our classroom so that we can all reach our learning goals.  The students each signed the rules and we have it hung in our classroom to remind us what we have all promised to do.

Writing Workshop

This week we launched our writing workshop curriculum with Small moment stories.  We are so excited to be real authors in first grade!  We read our mentor text The Veggie Monster and learned that you can take a very small moment and make a story out of it.  We came up with a small moment and wrote across three pages.  We also illustrated our stories.

Reading

We have been learning about our jobs we do during Daily 5.  We started working on two jobs;  Read to Self and work on writing.  We learned what these look like and practices these to build our stamina.  We are building our reading stamina every day when we practice read to self!  

It has been a pleasure to get to know all the kids so far and I look forward to meeting all of you soon at parent night.  Our year is off to a great start1