The First Week...How did it go?

Thank you to all of those people who sent well wishes after my post yesterday! I appreciate it and I know that if anybody understands how I am feeling, it's you all!! LOL But I am feeling better today, the baby is napping (again!! The poor thing keeps asking to go to bed :(. I just want to hug her and hug her all day.) and the hubby is watching football....so I finally have some time and the inclination to post a real post!

The first week!!! Doesn't it just send shivers of excitement and dread down your back? I read a post yesterday from another blogger that described exactly how I was feeling all week. Of course, now I can remember or find the blog...le sigh, but the gist was that during the first week it's so hard to adjust from last year's class in June who knew how everything worked, who knew just what you expected, who were able to walk across the classroom to sharpen their pencil without telling you about the time their dog's brother's aunt's mom rode a bike under an elephant. Lord, the stories!!!!! I know that they will get there. I know that we will be able to get through a read aloud without Little D shouting out a thousand and ones ideas that come to his head. I won't always have to explain the entire day's schedule the moment we walk in the door. At some point they will raise their hands when they have a question instead or trailing me around the room like 20 extra shadows.

But not tomorrow. And maybe not next week. But some day! 

Right? Le sigh.


So while I was working on modelling and remodelling and etc all of my expectations and routines we actually got some great work done in my class this week. I have a pretty bright group of Grade 3's, although I have a feeling reading is going to be a focus for a lot of them, and we got quite a bit of curriculum based work done. Here's a quick peek!

Here is my Book of the Week board in action. I am loving the structure that The Power of Retelling provides for my read alouds and reading strategy lessons. I would highly recommend it for anyone teaching literacy. One of my goals is still figuring out how to integrate my writing program. One day at a time...

Here is my daily schedule board in action. I am very happy that I went with blue and red borders to match the Dr. Suess theme.

One of our many anchor charts.... this is a skill we need, need, need to work on.

The Daily 5 is up and running, well started anyway. We have started Read to Self and are working on our stamina...5 minutes so far!!

This is where I will be conducting my math lessons. I have organized my black board with 5 different sections (I learned this from a colleague so I can't take credit). The first sections is "Getting Started" and this will be where I post a question or a problem as a "minds on" activity. The cue card with blue writing that you see posted around the orange question is the answers that were brainstormed my by my students, I just rewrote the answers in marker so they could be seen clearly.

Underneath you can see the "Lesson Problem". This, along with the next section "Working On It" will be where the main teaching is being done. After posting the question about the place value columns we spent some time with a place value mat and the Base Ten blocks in order to jump start our brains for further learning. Tomorrow, I plan to create an anchor chart together in the "Working On It" section as well as play some games and partner work before we debrief with the "Big Ideas/Highlights" and finally, the "Sample Problem.

You can see the whole board here, and I will post a picture of what it looks like once we have finished with this concept.

Lastly, I jumped right in with Math Stretches on the very first day! I meant to take a picture of the four that we completed from Tuesday to Thursday but the time just kept getting away from me. The one you see here is the prompt for Friday. Earlier in the week we did a graph of our mood (good/bad) about coming back to school, a growing pattern, and composing and decomposing numbers. I am loving it so far and my students seem to be really getting the hang of coming into the classroom, completing the math stretch and sitting on the carpet. Thank you, Laney Sammons!!

Well, that's it for now. I hope to get better at posting regularly as the school year settles in...but I am not going to promise anything!

Hope you are having a great Sunday!