First Day in 1st Grade!

Hello!  I hope you all had a great weekend.  Mine has gone by quickly and I have been busy!  Friday I was pooped after heading back to school last Thursday-Friday.  We ended up staying in and grilling out for dinner.  On Saturday, we took a 30 mile bike ride!  The hubby and I are becoming quite the cyclists!  We've already upgraded our road bikes to bikes made for longer distances.  After our ride, we ran a million errands and had a late Mexican dinner out.  Today, I've been meal prepping!  I made salads in a jars.  I did a Periscope about it, so if you missed it, you can check it out.  I've also been doing laundry, cleaning, and blogging today.

So like I mentioned above, Thursday was our first day with kids!  I didn't get back from Vegas until Sunday of last week and it was a mad dash to get the final details finished in my room.  Luckily, my mom had come before I went to Vegas to help me set up.  I revealed my classroom yesterday, so click HERE to see it!

Below are some pictures of our first day.  I don't plan a lot because I prefer to spend the time getting to know the kids and going over some procedures.  To see a full list of the procedures I teach throughout the first few weeks of 1st grade, click HERE.  There are a lot of hyper-links included in this post and I hope you'll take some time to look through each one for some ideas!

Here I am, soaked in sweat, after tearing open 9,000 supplies.  Well not really.  Most brought their supplies to our Meet the Teacher/Open House night, where I have parents open the supplies, but I had about 9 kids who didn't attend that.  So there were a decent amount of supplies that I had to open!

We have specials first thing, so I barely got to say "Hello" to my class before shipping them off to Music.  After Music, we did a few getting to know you things...some songs and introductions.  Then it was time to begin teaching procedures!  I didn't take any pictures of us practicing, but I will this week, because I like to hang the pictures in the room for the kids' reference.

We read David Goes to School.  We made some fun David heads to go with our writing.  

I read First Day Jitters and we did a little worksheet about how we felt about coming to school.  Then we each shared our paper and practiced being good listeners.  We also read a Jitter Juice poem and had some Jitter Juice!  The writing prompt {and many other fun things} is included in my Back to School pack!  Click below to check it out.  

  

We wrote our class mission statement.  I always begin with "Why are we here?"  I gave the students a sticky note and clip board and they could draw or write their reason.   They added them to the chart and we talked about them.  Most students say "to learn" or "to get ready for 2nd grade."  Then we wrote or drew what we were going to do to make sure we learn this year.  On Monday, we'll re-visit our sticky notes and form a class mission statement together.  This will be our class rules.  

We had some time to browse books.  I always get a teacher collection of back to school books from the library, because I don't open the classroom library until a few weeks into the year.

I had the kids draw themselves on the first day.  I share this with them and their parents at conference time and it's always fun to see!  *This is also included in my Back to School pack, shown above.

I also took my kids' first day photos and had them complete the "August" page of their memory book. If you haven't checked out my Memory Book yet, I highly recommend it!  It's a super fun and EASY way to create a school year's worth of memories for your kids.  I give mine to my kids at our Poetry Cafe and they parents and kids love it!!!!!

After lunch, we read Junie B. Jones and did a little counting.  We also went outside for an extra recess.  Before we knew it, it was time to start learning about our dismissal procedure and head home!  We made it!

Have a great week!
xo
Megan