The first week of school!

Well school started on Wednesday and I have been terrible at keeping up with blogging about my classroom, but I am going to try to be better about writing more often.  The first day of school was SUPER crazy.  The kids kept asking me what time lunch was, what we were going to do next, and "do we HAVE to do this?"  While teaching is very exciting and fun to me, the first day was a bit overwhelming and made me think, "is this what I have to look forward to EVERY day?!"  But, of course, day two and day three were steps in the direction I was hoping we would go.
One thing that I did not expect from my little first graders was that they FLY through work.  I thought I had over-planned, but we did each and every thing I planned and at a couple times I wished I had more planned.  I filled in the blanks with little games and things that ended up being successful.
Looking back over my first week of school, the best accomplishment I had was to provide magazines to the students and have them cut out their spelling words.  They LOVED the activity and were focused the entire time.  It was kind of an on the fly decision to do the activity because I didn't have magazines myself, but the teacher next door offered up some to me, and I'm glad she did!  Sometimes the least thought out projects end up working the best!
So as I prepare for my second week of school, I also am planning my sub folder.   I came across a wonderful website called education.com.  It is free to sign up and they have lots of worksheets you can download and print for free.  I found a bunch to put in my sub folder and also some I can use this upcoming week.  We will be learning basic addition and I found a monkey and banana addition worksheet which is just perfect to fit my classroom theme.
I hope everyone else is having a good end to their summer and a great beginning to the new school year! Happy Teaching!

Classroom Library & Misc. Pre-planning!

My daily thoughts lately have been, "so much to do, so little time!"  I feel like the school year has crept up on me very quickly!  In just 5 days my parents and students will be coming into the classroom for open house and then in exactly one week from tomorrow we will have our FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!  EEK! How exciting, but nerve-racking as well!

So, what have I done since last time that I can share with you?  I've finally finished my classroom library!  This has been the most drawn out project in the room, but I am completely satisfied!  Greg came to the classroom with me on Sunday evening and we labeled each bin of books with a color and capital letter.  We cut matching color construction paper bookmarks with the same capital letter as their corresponding bin.  This will enable students to put their books back in the correct bin and it will also allow me to control exactly which books they are reading at what time.  For example, I can say, "please choose a book to read from bin Q"  and I know that the books in bin Q are math books.  See my pictures below!

Another thing that I have worked on to prepare for the kids is to label their coat hooks and prepare my name sticks.  Using name sticks allows me to quickly and easily pick students in a fair way for groups or to call on them for answering questions. 

I would love to share more, but there's so much to do and so little time!  Blog more soon!  Happy Planning!

My bulletin boards!

Progress has been made in the classroom on finishing up my bulletin boards.  I have also been working on more documents to provide to the parents at the start of the school year, but I'll blog about those in the next post.  Here are some of my bulletin boards and my ideas for how they will work in my room.

This will be used for our high frequency words.  We will add words to this board as the year goes on.

This board is a reminder of the numbers for the students.  I will add math vocab words as the year progresses as well.

This will be an extension of our calendar exercise.  Students will learn place value while counting the days in school.

This bulletin board will display the students' work.  The monkeys swinging on the vine say words like "great job" etc.

One week left until open house for the parents and students to come see the room! It's time to get everything wrapped up soon!