Lately in first grade....

I haven't blogged about school much lately. Probably because it has been all I eat, sleep, and breathe. I think its funny how most people think teachers do the same thing every single year. When in all reality we change what we teach and how we teach it all the time. We are all students at heart and keep learning how to better ourselves for our own students. And this ... is why we are so exhausted all of the time. Okay. Off my soapbox!

Here are some things we have been up to (that I have taken photos of!) in our first grade classroom.

For the first week of school's homework I send home a little person from Lakeshore with directions for the parents and child to work together to make it look like the student. Then they have to write about what makes their child so special. It's always a sweet getting-to-know-you activity and makes the kids feel really proud.

The first week of school we also read "The Little Engine that Could". We talked about how we should never use the word "can't" in our classroom. (Such a pet peeve of mine... "But, I can't!!") We then all go outside and bury the word "can't" so it is no longer allowed to be said.


We then come back into the classrom and make our own "I can trains". The kids have to write 2 sentences about things that they can indeed do.

This week one of my teammates found the cutest little hippo from blogland and we used it to fit our needs. We had our kids make circle maps about all of the things we did during the first week of school. They then created a hippo that hung in the windows with the sign, "Hip, Hip, Hooray. We're in first grade today!"

(Don't mind all the DIBELS mess outside of my classroom. Clearly benchmark testing was being done!)

This week we have been reading and learning about ants. The class made paper ants and labeled the body parts. We also created a tree map about ants. I loved their vocabulary!