Tag Archives: first day

1st Day of 1st Grade 2018!

The room is mostly put together.  The pencils are sharpened (well because they came that way!).  We’ve met each other and seen our new space.  We are all finally here.  It’s the 1st day of 1st grade and we’re ready for a great year!!

I want to take a few minutes in this first post to welcome you to my blog (if you’re new) and welcome you back (if you’ve been here before).  I want to start our year (or maybe longer!) off with a little bit of rationale for how I hope this conversation will go, as well as for the purpose of this blog.  I hope that it will help you as you navigate through our 1st grade journey to better understand why I write what I write here. 🙂 .

I could tell the long story about how I started and how this blog has changed over the last 7 years (and you know, that story is probably already posted here somewhere!), but instead I’ll just jump into the here-and-now and tell you that most of all I am here because I love teaching.  I love kids and spending time with them everyday, hearing their thinking, getting to know their hearts, watching them discover new things.  I am also here because I love to write.  I have found that writing is a very powerful and important way for me to process and reflect upon what happens in our classroom, and helps me to improve my technique and then do better for the next time.

So, as you read posts here, you will notice a couple of things about what I write.  First of all, I tend to go deep.  Rather than tell you about a whole week’s worth of learning or activities in one post, I’ll dig down and just focus on ONE THING at a time.  I like to tell the WHOLE story, usually with a backstory, and often with ideas for where I’ll go next.  I like to include pictures and videos so you can see what happened and/or highlight some super smart thing a kid did or said.  I will almost always tell you why we did what we did and explain my rationale behind it or my thinking about the purpose.  Oh, and I will probably tell you about what DIDN’T work.

Aside from my own process and reflection, I want this blog to be an open-door peek into what happens in Rm. 111 every day, especially for those of you who send your babies to me each morning and wonder what happens all day.  I want you to be able to imagine what it would be like to be a first grader at Robinson, and also to get a bigger picture of how and what your kiddos are learning.  I hope to give you enough detail that you can ask your learner questions and get a conversation going around your dinner table–so that you hear more than just “it was good” when you ask about school. 🙂  Additionally, I hope that others who read this blog (who don’t have kiddos in Rm. 111) will get a picture of what is happening in our school, in our district, in our state, and maybe using that to inform what happens in your own classroom or learning space.  I hope to be an inspiration to other educators, like so many have been to me over the years.  How lucky we are that technology is such that we can reach into places so far away and connect with them so easily!

Lastly, I want to emphasize that I want this blog to be a place of CONVERSATION!  If you have a question, please ask it!  If you have a comment, please write it!  If you see a cute picture of your kiddo and you want to say hi to them, wave away!  If you have a suggestion for how we could do something better, please leave it!  I know that the best years on 20somethingkids have been when parents, teachers, students and even strangers have been connected in conversations about learning–we all got smarter and were so much better for it! Ok, and of course, then, if I’m inviting you to connect with us, I’m also asking that you do it kindly.  🙂

So…that hopefully has gotten us off on a good foot and we are ready for a fabulous first grade year together.  But wait–I haven’t shown you anything about this year’s bunch of super smart, super funny, super creative learners in Rm. 111 yet.  So, here they are, ready to jump into this new journey.  Look how proud they are. 🙂

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Hi, Rm. 111 friends! (We are missing one friend in this picture–Will–and will post another version of this soon with ALL of our friends.  SORRY!!)

Ok, and then another thing I’ve started doing every year is making sure to get a first day and last day pic to show how amazingly kiddos have grown in just one short year.  They always come as babies and leave as such big kids!!  Here’s our first day pics from August 15, 2018. 🙂 (And…just as I’m collecting them all I realize there was a different friend who was not here!  I’ll add him when I can get back to my book wall tomorrow! My apologies–first graders don’t stay put for very long!! lol)

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Whew! Man…sometimes the first post is the hardest!  We’re off and running and here we go into a busy, busy year!  I already have like 17 blog posts I want to write–hopefully most of them will show up here. 🙂

And to get our conversation started: please leave your name and tell us from where you are reading our blog.  We’ve had readers from as far away as Australia and China in the past and it’s a BLAST to see how far our words and pictures stretch.  If you’re a family member of a Rm. 111 friend, leave a note and give them some advice for a great learning year.  And no matter who you are, thanks for being here and taking time to peek into our first grade world! 🙂

Pictures of the Day: May 6, 2015

 

Ok, hold on tight–today was a VERY eventful day and so this post is picture-heavy. I think I counted 10.  But then I may have added more. 🙂  You ready?  Let’s go!

I usually put the pics in these posts in order based on when they happen, so these would come first anyway, but I’m also putting them first because I think they set the tone for the whole day.  The way things usually work in Rm. 202 is that I have a plan and then we decide how that will work for us that day, and often times things change (sometimes really drastically, sometime they just take a little bit different direction).

I was meeting with a group today and after our book, we got out our whiteboards for word work.  I remembered that we had talked about a chart/sign to help kiddos remember what to do with the pencil sharpener (we just got 2 new crank ones–you know, old school!) and for some reason people are CRAZY with them.  What I know about what this group knows and what they need, they were the ones to make the chart!  As we talked about what the sign should be called, they agreed that “PENCIL SHARPENER RULES” would make sense (like the chart we made to help our friends remember how to wisely use our construction paper).  As we got started talking about how to write PENCIL, we clapped out the syllables, wrote the PEN part and started working on the CIL chunk, talking about how it could either be PENSIL  or PENCIL.  It wasn’t a clear decision about which was correct (I thought for sure they’d be able to tell which one looked right), so I took it to mean we needed to learn something new.  So we started talking about C and how it has a soft sound and a hard sound.

Now…being me and doing what I do, I didn’t just start saying something like “Now these are the rules for hard C and soft C and when the C proceeds these letters it’s this and when it’s these it’s that,”–you get the idea.  Instead, we started making  a list of C words and put them in the correct column together.  Almost immediately, Makayla noticed that there were lots of Os on the hard side.  We kept going and pretty soon we noticed that the letters on the soft C side were E and I and that the other letters were on the other list.  Voila! We had a rule.  Well at least a conjecture that we thought we could use and teach our friends.

So…being Rm. 202 friends and doing what we do, we thought another sign was in order.  This one they decided to hang on the word wall–right by the letter C. 🙂  Hopefully we’ll finish soon.  Who knows?  We’re working on at least 3 other interactive writing projects and we’ve only got 15 more days!  Oh well, guess there’s always next year!

Whew! That was a long one. Ok…so I know that it looks like Nate is just being a super-silly 1st grader in this picture, but he’s actually posing like that for a reason. I tried to kill 3 stones with this one picture and show you: the yummy (and tiny) chocolate bar and SUPER cute gift card he brought from Whole Foods today (yep, I said CUTE–there’s a picture next to show the detail) AND the tooth he lost on Monday. Ok, I guess he didn’t actually lose it, he had to get it taken out but it’s gone nevertheless and you can finally see his big ‘ole grown-up tooth coming through!

See, I told you it was cute! It’s funny because without the scale of that bag to Nate in the previous picture you don’t see the funny size of these 2 objects. It will be hard to spend that gift card because it is seriously one of the cutest things I have ever seen. I told the kids I’d probably ask for it back after I redeem it and save it in my Writer’s Notebook. Um…just because that’s what I do. 🙂

C.J. and I worked really hard with build a castle with the Lincoln Logs during choice time today.  It’s the first time I’ve done that.  So fun!  The rest of the class was really impressed too, I guess, because they kept coming over to take pictures of their own!

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Um…yeah, so this happened during choice time, too: Emily made me a bonnet! She came over at one point and had to measure the string so she’d know the strap was the right size, and she pointed out how she put a little tag in it, too, so I’d know what way was the back. First graders are kind of amazing, I’d say!

Alright, two more, and these fit into the I’ve-officially-lost-track-of-how-many-teeth-we’ve-lost category.  I am pretty sure it’s over 20 now, but needless to say, 1st grade mouths are VERY HOLEY at this time of year.  So cute!!

Charlie requested this picture because I was behind. Hee hee, tough crowd!
Amelia had to join in on the fun. 🙂

First Day of Fifth Grade!

Wow–how is it already the first day of school?  Seems like it was just the last day of school. 🙂

I only have enough energy to share a couple of things from our day–tells you how busy we were!  I need an early bedtime!

First of all, here’s how I introduced myself to my kiddos today:

I was so excited to read about this idea when my friend Michelle shared it with me from here.  I took a little bit of a different twist on the content, but really enjoyed making it!

While we did not really follow our “official” schedule today, since it was just Day 1, we did try to fit our community building and routine learning activities somewhere near the time they would actually happen.  We read aloud some of my favorites–I Want My Hat Back and This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen, as well as First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg.  We did a 5th Grade pursuit (the old “find someone who” game where you sign each others’ papers), found a new book for each kiddo to read, started investigating ways we are smart (more with this tomorrow!), did our first Math Warm-Up of the year, introduced Writer’s Workshop and wrote postcards home about the first day of school.  Like I said, we were busy!

But even with all that fun and excitement, I’m pretty sure that the only thing my new kiddos will tell their families when they get home is that

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Yep.  Definitely gonna be needing some snacks this year. 🙂

So all-in-all it was a great day! Can’t wait to get back in there and do it all over again tomorrow.

But before I go, I have one thing to say to all of new my friends–new to me and new to Kirkwood: WELCOME! You belong here. 🙂