TeachNC: Our First Week

We made it through our first week of the 2014-2015 school year! Hooray. It was such a great, successful week. I think it's one of the best starts to a school year yet! This week we spent a lot of time building routines, going over expectations, and building a positive classroom community! Here are a few pictures from our week!

I always love to take a picture of my kiddos sometime the first week and then the last week to show them how much they've grown/changed!

Each morning, we make 3 nominations of classmates who did an excellent job the day before. Maybe they helped a friend or someone just noticed they worked really hard. Then one of them gets chosen to turn on our Creative Minds Light. I'll be getting one of the neon plug in boards to put up but for now this works. We chant "Flip that Sign" and do a little fireworks cheer when it gets turned on to symbolize the start of our day.

We spent a lot of time this week talking about what our mascot "Splash" would encourage us to do. We are in the process of implementing PBIS and our 5 expectations are "Be Respectful, Be Responsible, Be Safe, Be Engaged, and Be a Leader"

We've been focusing on our routines in all parts of our day. Eventually, our workshops will encompass many things going on at once, but for now we all do the same things at the same time until we get the hang of it! Watching video from the end of the year last year I was amazed at all of the different things going on and working effectively in my classroom during a workshop (even when I thought maybe they weren't) and I can't wait to see these kids doing the same things!

I haven't quite been able to figure out a Math routine that truly works for me so I'm hoping this year will be it! We do a warm-up which can be a number talk, problem solving, or fact quiz. Our Movement skill helps us practice skip counting, counting by 1's, facts, etc. Then our lesson. After the lesson, students will fill out an exit tickets that will help me form intervention groups for the next day. Followed by work time where they might be creating games, working at workstations, on the computers, or any number of things.

One of my favorite things from this week is learning about how we are all beautiful and unique...but that together we create the beautiful masterpiece that is our classroom. We put together this piece of art that will hopefully stay up all year (heat and tape, be good to me!) We read 2 stories, ! (yes that's the name- if you haven't heard of it, check it out!) and The Crayons that Talked. While I worked with a few students at a time, the entire class was spread across the classroom all working on a collaborative piece of art...Working together at its finest. It made me smile from ear to ear!