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!