A Peek at Our Week!

We have had such an amazing first week of 1st grade!  In addition to playing lots of "getting to know you" activities, we also reviewed the Harlan Habits of Respect, Responsibility and Kindness and began to build our classroom community!  

Harlan Habits in action:

Respect - We participated in our first Respect Circle, which is our grade level morning meetings on Fridays. 

Responsibility - We began packing up our own folders at the end of the day.

Kindness - We celebrated the birthdays of our principal, Dr. Thompson, and our custodian, Ms. Markeeda by singing to them as a grade level.

Here are a few of our favorite activities form our first week:

After talking about how everyone can get a little nervous when they do something for the first time, we read the book First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg.  In this story, we followed the main character, Sarah, as she gets ready for her first day of school.  She is so nervous that she doesn't even want to go!  The children loved the book, especially when we fins out in the end that Sarah is actually the teacher!  To help us with our first day jitters, we made a special concoction called Jitter Juice!

This included a mixture of bravery (white grape juice), magic potion (sparking water) and color changing bubbles!  Here we are enjoying our jitter juice.  We all felt a little more confidant after this!

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!

We also reviewed math concepts such as partners of 10, counting on and three addends, discussed our classroom pets, read lots of books (our favorites so far are But No Elephants! by Jerry Smath and The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak), shared our favorite reading memories, learned all about the "big kid's playground" and practiced our hand signals to help us communicate without interrupting!

I can't wait to see what this year has in store for us!  We are off to a fantastic start!