A Peek into Our First Week!

We have had such an amazing first week of first grade!  We played lots of "getting to know you" games, reviewed the Harlan Habits of Respect, Responsibility and Kindness, and began to build our classroom community!  Here are a few of our favorite first week activities:

We discussed how everyone gets a little nervous now and then, and that being nervous can also be called having the jitters!  We read the book First Day Jitters to see how the main character felt on her first day of school.  The children loved it when, and the end, we find our that Sarah is actually the teacher and not one of the students!  To help with our first day jitters, we made our own jitter juice:

This included a mix of no-more-jitters, a magic potion and color-changing bubbles!

We all decided that not only did our Jitter Juice taste delicious, but it did the trick!  No one was nervous after taking a few sips!

At the end of our first day, we played with a special play dough called The Magic Mix!  This all-white dough came with a very special poem that explained its magic:

Magic Play Dough,

Oh so white,

I make this wish

with all my might!

If another color does appear,

its sure to be a GREAT school year!

After saying the magic words, we began squishing and mushing our dough.  Right before our eyes, our once white dough started changing colors!  It looks like everyone will have a great first grade year!

Not only did we have a blast in Room 112 this week, we also visited our specials classes (also known as Unified Arts or UA classes) for the first time this year!

Here we are on our first day of music with Mrs. Cooper

In our first visit to the media center with Mrs. Stayer

In PE with Mr. Price

And enjoying being creative in art with Mr. Fackler

Finally, in Reader's Workshop, we reviewed the different ways to read a book.  Each student was given a book mark to help them remember that books can be read by looking at the pictures, reading the words or retelling a familiar story.  As the children practiced using the skill they felt most comfortable with, they used the book mark to point out how they were choosing to read a book from our classroom library.

I can already tell that this is going to be a GREAT year!