Week 1

What a great start to a new school year. We have week one under our belt and we have an amazing class! Let's take a look at some of the fun things we are learning in Mrs. Langham's class. 

We began by reading a story called The Day a Monster Came to School. This book helped us learn the importance of following rules. 

We discussed why it is important to have rules and we brainstormed a list of rules to follow in our classroom.

We had fun learning a song about following the rules too.

We learned how to use our school supplies and practiced coloring, cutting and gluing.

We read many beginning of the year books. Here are some of the highlights that we enjoyed.

One character we read about has a really long name.

We had fun making our names in rainbow colors.

They are proudly displayed in our classroom to help us learn our friends' names.

 We counted and graphed the number of letters in our names.

We learned lots of songs, rhymes and chants to help us learn our friends in the class. We loved singing a new version of the Itsy Bitsy Spider that is called the Silly Willy Spider.

Then we illustrated this song.

We read the book, A My Name is Alice.

We found the pattern in the book and took turns naming things that we liked that start with the same letter as our name.

Then we followed the pattern to create our own pictures. These are displayed in the hallway outside of our classroom.

Willoughby Wallaby Woo was another name chant that we learned, both in the pocket chart and through illustration.

We finished off the week by reading and singing a Pete the Cat book about the Wheels on the Bus. Then we learned a new version of the song and we put our names into it.

Making the craft for this activity was lots of fun and we practiced all of our skills using our school supplies.

Our writing journals are very special to us. We begin our day brainstorming what we want to write about and then telling a story through pictures.

Mrs. Langham wants us to use at least 5 colors when we are illustrating and to add lots of detail. Some of us are able to write words too. We read the wordless book Pancakes for Breakfast. This book helped us to learn that you can tell a story through pictures and that there is more to telling a story then just labeling what is on each page. We hope to transfer that skill to our writing in the weeks to come.

Story time seems to be a favorite of this class. We read so many books this week, many of which aren't even pictured. We learned how to take care of books and what happens when you don't after reading this book.

We learned the parts of a book and how to "turn the page" after reading these books multiple times (definitely a class favorite and Mrs. Langham about lost her voice after reading in her best Grover and Elmo voices).

We also talked about the Hill Agreements and set up our expectations for the classroom. This book reminded us how important it is to use our manners.

 

It was a treat to have our principals come read to us. They talked to us about being safe. We also learned some important rules in the cafeteria and about the 5 people we are allowed to talk to when we are sitting at our table in the cafeteria. Here are Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Meuhling and Mr. Spraberry.

Another visitor (or two if you look closely) that we had this week was Mrs. Hobbs (and Frankie). Mrs. Hobbs is our reading specialist at Hill and a dear friend of mine. We team taught 1st grade together and then she retired. 

Our math time starts with calendar each day.  We have a routine during calendar time that we do each day. We also sing the "Days of the Week" song and the "Macarena Months" song. I wanted the class to be more actively involved in the calendar, so I have incorporated calendar journals. We fill these out each day to help us learn about the calendar.

This week in math, we spent a lot of time exploring the math manipulatives. It is necessary to get the "play" out of the way before they actually use these tools for other math concepts. We practiced cleaning up and rotating through math centers using the manipulatives.

We were introduced to science by reading this book. We will be doing much more science next week and the students cannot wait to start doing some experiments.

The favorite part of our day is free centers. We had to earn this privilege and it was well worth the wait. We enjoy this time of the day.