A Peek At Our Week!

We made it through our second week.  The second week is always ex-haust-ing.  My head is swimming with anchor charts for Daily 5 stamina-building, math behaviors and routines, and getting my firsties to transition from having two recesses in kindergarten to only one in first grade.  Needless to say, they were t.i.r.e.d this week!  I don’t blame them. The second week is always a little boring for me. My ultimate goal was to drill our routines so that NEXT week, we can start our small groups and get to the fun stuff. 🙂

We did however have a lot of fun learning and practicing -at words this week.  We sang and studied our favorite poem and song, Rat-a-Tat Cat.   We highlighted all of the at words within the poem as a whole class.

This became the very first poem we put into our Poetry Binders for this year.  They LOVE using their highlighters to go on word hunts for the word families we study each week! 🙂

In between building our stamina for Read to Self and Read to Someone, we learned how to identify the setting of a story.  We sang a song and created this anchor chart throughout the week.  I listed all of the books we had read over the past two weeks.  We revisited the pictures of these books and decided where and when each story took place.  They did a great job with this!

I had to post this picture because this is what their teacher felt like she did all week! 😉 I finally finished all of my kiddos’ DRA’s.  I always really enjoy assessing my students’ on their fall DRA.  I love figuring out where they are as readers and getting my first glimpse into their little reading brains. 🙂 My head immediately starts to explode with which strategy certain kids need first, who will fit well in a group together, and how I can challenge my advanced student on a beginning chapter book while still helping another one master his sounds. 🙂 This challenge is part of the reason I adore first grade.   We move from madness to marvelous in 9 short months! 🙂

Truly, Week 2, the week of stamina-building-craziness is not my favorite, but so necessary to lay down the foundation so that we can have a successful, fun-filled year! 🙂 Next week I have lots of fun planned for us! We will begin to learn what science is and figure out what scientists do, conduct experiments as we learn how to work in science teams, and dive into our reading groups.