Our First Day

Hi Families,

What a fun filled day today was! I loved meeting and getting to know our class. Today was all about learning about our classroom, school, and each other.

We started the morning with a fun activity called "Magic Play Doh". Each student started with a ball of white play doh and I explained that it would change color if they was going to have a great year in first grade. We closed our eyes, smushed it in our hands, and to our surprise everyone's ball of dough changed to red, blue, yellow, pink or orange! :)

We spent our morning talking about things we like and getting to know each other. We also took a tour of the school and had our snacks. We read aloud a great book called First Day Jitters and talked about how even teachers get jitters about the first day of school!

After recess and lunch, we made a class chart of feelings we had starting first grade. We read aloud Wemberly Worried and did a little activity at our seats to describe our feelings. I gave everyone the option to write or draw, and they did great! We shared these on the rug together. We also read a book called the Night Before First Grade and did some writing and drawing about things we did last night to prepare for our first day.

Since Tuesdays are our days without a specialist, this gave us time to complete our first day of math. I introduced our calendar routine. Each day we go over the date, count the days of school, describe the weather, etc. After, we had some fun with pattern blocks and each student completed a graphing activity. I gave each first grader a cup of pattern blocks and they graphed the shapes to determine how many of each shape they had. This helped everyone determine which shape they had the most of. I was so pleased to see how well everyone did making a bar graph!

It sure was a fun day and I was so proud!
Love,  Miss Waterman