First Week of School in Review!

Back to school is in full swing!

This past week was all about getting used to routines, learning to listen and follow the rules, and just having fun.

My first graders worked on a little craftivity called

 Words that Describe...

Each child shared a word that described themselves and I wrote them on the board. Then, they chose six of their favorite words and wrote them in the boxes. They also drew a picture of themselves in the frame. I always do this activity during the first week of school because it's easy to do, fun for the children, and they look so pretty hanging up in the classroom.

Right click the photos and click open link in new tab to make the photos larger.

I have a similar activity in my teaching store for free. 

You can check it out here.

We spent a lot of time learning the Whole Brain Teaching Classroom Rules. Saying the rules, along with the gestures, has really been such fun. The booklet below was sent home so the children can teach their family the rules, as well. I am only using four of the five rules. Looks like I neglected to snap a picture of rule 3! LOL! You can find this booklet here.

We also began assembling our Journeys Interactive Notebook. We decorated and glued on the cover and started adding the sight word pages. Each week, the children will highlight the words to know for the week.

I read one of my favorite books!

Afterwards, the children completed their first book review.

I modeled how to do this and the whole class wrote the same sentence. I don't want you to think my first graders are writing this well, on their own, already!

We'll be doing lots of book reviews. I have book reviews for every season, holiday, and theme you can think of. You can find the one above here.

All in all, it was a great first week of school for my first graders. Since I taught them last year, as kindergartners, we are already very comfortable with each other and they quickly caught on to the first grade rules and procedures.

Kindergarten was a whole different ballgame! 

They will need a few more weeks of training before I show you anything truly productive! LOL!

Here is a fun name writing activity we did.

We also started the Aa page in our alphabet/handwriting book. 

I didn't snap any pictures though.

We brainstormed words that began with Aa and I modeled how to write capital A. I ran out of time before we got to practice writing lower case a. It's very easy to run out of time with kindergarten! But, they did enjoy it, so we'll finish it up on Monday.