The First Few Days

Well, we have survived the first few days of first grade! And first, we just want to say… Wow! Air-conditioning makes all the difference in the world! It was one of the smoothest starts we have had and the fact that the little ones were not melting from the heat definitely helped them to settle in quickly!

We spent the first three days on routines, routines, and more routines! In between all of the routines we filled in the time with several of the wonderful activities from Abby’s Fun with Firsties back to school packet. While all of the activities were great, Jitter Juice was definitely the most popular! The kids LOVED it! To go along with the idea of first day jitters, we also read The Teacher from the Black Lagoon. After reading, we let the kids on a secret: teachers get nervous too! So we wrote our first class book in which the teacher is nervously waiting for her students and imagines all of them as monsters. The students wrote their name in the sentence frame “_____is a monster” and then drew a picture of themselves as a monster. They loved imagining what they could look like as a creature from the black lagoon. It also helped those quiet, shy ones realize that it was okay to be nervous because their teacher was nervous too!

On Friday, we kicked off our hallway book tree project with reading the David books. We discussed being a peacemaker vs. peacebreaker and then each student made their own David to hang on the tree. They turned out so cute! However, we can’t take credit for the idea. We got it from Cara at The First Grade Parade, who got the idea here.

Now it’s a new week and while we are still drilling those routines, we have also kicked off our friendship unit with Elephant and Piggie! Those loveable characters from Mo Willems are already a hit with the students! More from that unit to come soon!