Our First Day and How I Start Daily 5

“Eyes and ears!”
“I love how ___________ is sitting criss-cross applesauce!”
“Oops! I hear someone talking. Let’s try that again.”
“Can you show us how to push your chair in?”
“Let’s echo our class rules for the 4 billionth time, friends!”

Haha don’t you love the first week of school? Today was our first day. I’m exhausted! I think I’m going to have a great first grade class. A few of them need quite a lot of work with being “still in kindergarten” mode shall we say? However, I’m determined that we’ll get there. A couple weeks of “routine, routine, routine” and we should be taking off in no time!

Here’s what we did today!

We read some favorite back-to-school stories:

We did our Magic Dough activity from my First Week Fun! pack. They LOVED it!

We also ate our marshmallows after we did a fun activity about our “marshmallow toes and voices.” We created an anchor chart and observed our marshmallows carefully so that we could be “expert marshmallows” in the hallways and restrooms.

Tonight, I’ll be re-reading my Daily 5 book as we get ready to begin launching tomorrow. I spent some time after school filling my firstie’s book bins with levels A-C books for this first week. Next week, I will mix it up more and start to teach them how to book shop on their own.

We will also start learning the 3 Ways to Read a Book tomorrow using one of my favorite books, Cookie’s Week. I have changed “retell a book” to “reread a book” as we launch Read to Self. I do this because I found it difficult for my students to “Retell a Story” to themselves at this point in the year. They do a great job at retelling a story to their partners during Read to Someone, but had a hard time with it during Read to Self. This just works better for me. 🙂

I always use Cookie’s Week for our first day of launching for several reasons. One, it is a short text with great illustrations that easily allow my students to “Read the pictures.” We start off by telling a story of how Cookie keeps getting in trouble. We then launch Read to Self for 3 minutes.

Then, I model “Read the Words” by reading the story aloud a couple of times to the class. We talk about the book together, go over our I-Charts again, and practice our stamina for (hopefully) 4 minutes.

Finally, we learn our third way to read a book: Reread the book. By this time, the students have picked up the repetitive pattern of the book and they are able to read the story with me. This story also has great illustrations for teaching students how to use the pictures cues within a book! 🙂

I’m excited to share Daily 5 with another classroom of firsties this year. If you are unfamilar with Daily 5, you can find more information at the official website by clicking HERE.

All in all, it was a wonderful first day and I’m feeling very blessed! Below is a picture of the flowers my husband sent to school today. This has been his little tradition that he started back when we were dating. That year, I had briefly explained that I always get butterflies the night before the first day of school because it sets the tone for the whole year. He’s always remembered that, and this was the 6th year in a row that he’s sent flowers to my classroom on the first day for “good luck.” 🙂 He’s a keeper. 😉

Thank you for catching up with me for our first day of first grade! 🙂 After a long day, I’m headed off to make a cup of tea and watch Dance Moms. 🙂 Have you started school yet? If so, how is it going?