We Survived

Well, we survived the first 3 days back!  I'm kind of grateful it wasn't a full week.  We had inside recess all day on Friday and that can get to everybody!  We did enjoy wearing our pajamas and watching 'The Polar Express' though!  I even surprised them with a hot chocolate treat!

We will be collecting items for the PTO gift baskets.  Our theme is S'mores.  More information will be in the newsletter so look for it there. You can send in any item that you like that goes with S'mores.  Since I am a BIG pinterest fan, I have learned to try new things on my S'mores.  Have you ever tried different candy bars?  Have you ever tried roasting a rolo inside your marshmallow?  I have BIG plans for this summer's camp fires.  I may even just roast them over the grill for fun to try these great ideas.

Looking forward to a full week of learning and fun!

Happy New Year!!

Wow!!  2013!!  Happy New Year to all of you!  I hope that everyone had a restful vacation.  We had a bonus 2 extra days!  Those were nice, for me anyway!  We are the luckiest class because we had our party before the snowstorm hit and we don't have to plan on it this week!  I feel lucky anyway!  We will plan on having our pajama afternoon on Friday while the other classes are doing their Christmas parties.  We will plan on wearing our PJs for only the afternoon though.  So, pack those PJs and we will change after lunch.  If anything changes, I will send a note home. 

We had a lot of fun at our Christmas party though.  We played some Minute-to-Win-It games.  I think everyone had a fun time. Here is a picture from one of the games we played.  Some of the other games we played were Face the Cookie.  Players had to move a cookie from their forehead to their mouths only using their facial muscles.  We also had tissue paper fish that they had to use a plate to get into a basket a few feet away.  Some students had to suck a bean to a straw and carry it to a cup on another table.  We had a lot of fun and everyone was a good sport while we played the games!!
                                                  
Addean doing nose dive.  She had vaseline on her nose and had to transfer cotton balls from one place to another using only her nose!!



We also went to the post office and mailed our letters to Santa.  Good thing we did this before the snow storm or our letters would have been late!!

I can't wait to see what this new year brings with this class.  I hope it will be even more fun than the beginning of the year has been!  I'm looking forward to it!

Finally got back into my blog!!!  Here are just a few reminders because it's a busy time of year!!

Monday December 10:  Christmas Program @ 7:00.  Please have your child here at 6:45 in the multipurpose room.

Friday, December 14:  Gingerbread houses.  Please have your item here by Wednesday, December 12.

Wednesday December 19:  Christmas party.  Boys will bring a boy gift and girls will bring a girl gift.  Nothing over $3.

I am sending home a sheet that tells you how to order online for book orders.  Our book order is due on Wednesday so that it will hopefully be here by Christmas.  If you want it to be a surprise just let me know and I will hold it here at school until you can pick it up.  This won't only be for this month, this will be for the rest of the school year.  If you have any questions, please let me know.

Finally a new Post

I can't believe that it's been almost a whole month since I've updated my blog!!! Part of the reason is that I got blocked
 from my blog and had to find someone to help me figure out how to get around to where I was a manager and all this crazy technology stuff that I don't understand.  The good news it that I know how to do it now and I can finally update this! 

Here's what the latest and greatest is:

We finally got something up in the hallway thanks so much to Mrs. Abrahamson for coming in to help with it!!  Everyone was even here that day!!  It's an idea I got from pinterest of course.  These are silly jack-o-lanterns.  I think they turned out great!!

Another thing that we did was had our first reading celebration.  We had a guest reader come in and read to our class.  Mr. Smith was our guest reader.  He came in and read 'The Principal from the Black Lagoon' to us.  Then we all signed a Reading Constitution that we created together.  This is something that we pledge to do during readers' workshop to make readers' workshop a place where everyone can work hard to become better readers.  We thought it would be a great idea to make an owl and we could then each sign a feather and then we could hang the owl on our giant willow tree in the library.  Here's how it turned out:

One more fun thing that we did was finished a chapter book of a series called Ready Freddy.  The title was 'Going Batty'.  At the end it teaches you how to draw a bat.  We decided we would give it a try.  Here's how they turned out:

Be sure to check next week for our Halloween celebration pictures!!

Library Grand Opening Celebration

We just keep celebrating here in first grade!!  This week we didn't have any birthdays but we did celebrate.  After Open House I covered all the shelves in the classroom library so you couldn't see the boxes of books.  On Friday after we went to Library for the first time, we came back and we had our very own library celebration.  We had a ribbon cutting ceremony, followed by juice and cookies, followed by reading in the library!  It was soooooooo much fun!  I think they would've read the books in the library FOREVER!!  That gives me goosebumps!

Lauran got to cut the ribbon

We were also able to finish our classroom promise at the end of last week.  We say this every morning to each other when we come down to the math area.  Here's how it goes: 

"When we care about each other and our classroom, we always tell the truth, we share what we have, we are bucket-fillers all the time.  We listen carefully, try our best, and have fun together.  We treat others the way we want to be treated and when someone asks us to stop, we stop.  This is who we are, even when no one is watching."  We made a plate to look like us and signed our names to make a collage around the promise.  I think it turned out GREAT!

What a Busy First Week of First Grade!

We had a very busy week!  I don't know about your little firstie, but I was exhausted on Friday.  I took a 3 hour nap BEFORE bedtime!  We sure did have a lot of fun though!  I am getting to know bits and pieces of each and every one of our new class members. 

Our first day was full of nerves and jitters for sure!  We enjoyed a story called First Day Jitters.  It's got a surprise ending...the whole time you're reading the story, you think a little girl named Sarah is not wanting to go to school because she's nervous...but it turns out to be the teacher!!  After this story, we enjoyed some Jitter Juice to help calm our "first day jitters".  We also enjoyed some trail mix that we made for ourselves that we took very seriously because it was a special recipe for first grade success!  Here's the recipe:

You Will Need:                    2 cups effort                        2 cups kindness
                  1 handful curiosity                 3 Tablespoons honesty
                  2 cups teamwork                  1 cup excitement to learn
                  1 handful fairness                  Sprinkle of pride in your work
We talked about about what all of these were and what they meant.  I brought in an ingredient for each of these and they put a little of each of these in a bag and enjoyed!

 I was also able to capture the classes first day pictures....just in case you forgot I got their First Day of First Grade picture!!  I got this idea from pinterest.  Yes, I will admit that I am a pinterest freak!  I love the ideas on there though.  Hopefully you do too!

We do A LOT of sharing circles in my class - one after each core subject workshop - so we get to learn about each other very quickly.  Bringing in their favorite books helps us get to know each other too and each others reading likes as well!!  Here are a few pictures of our favorite books.  We share a few each day.  I am very excited to see that I have a lot of these very same favorite books in our classroom library!  It's crazy to think that by the end of the year they will be reading their favorite books!!  I get goosebumps just thinking about it!

  

We also had birthday celebrations last week as well.  Not 1, but 2!!  Nothing like starting the year off with a bang!  Dominick and Hailey both turned 6 last week.  We were happy that we got to celebrate with them.  We hope that they have a very blessed year!

Whew....are you exhausted yet?  We did this plus much more!  We created a classroom promise that I will post a picture of next week.  We also learned all about how first grade works....even inside recess!  It has quite a few changes from kindergarten, but I think they will like it.  They all keep coming back!

So excited to meet my new class last night at open house!!!  Some of you stayed and did A LOT of exploring!  That was wonderful!  I hope you liked what you saw.  We will be doing MUCH more exploring throughout the year so I hope you are excited to come back on Tuesday!  I know I am now that I got to put some faces with these names that I have been writing on everything!  I hope you all enjoy the LAST weekend before school starts!  Looks like its going to be warm.  I hope you can enjoy it doing your most favorite thing of summer.....SWIMMING!!!!  Or maybe it's eating s'mores around the campfire?  Whatever it is, I hope you enjoy this last taste of summer!  See you Tuesday!!