What We’ve Been Up To!

Wow it has been one BUSY week. You’ll have to excuse me if my blogging isn’t every few days like I normally try for. I may be a bit scattered over the next few weeks. Between school, packing up our condo to move in 3 weeks, school, appointments for the new house, and school…things are getting a bit crazy around here! But I’m loving every minute of it. 🙂

My firsties are finally settled into routine. Daily 5 is in full swing. Math Workshop is launched and running, Writer’s Workshop is starting to take off (slowly), and it appears that all of our benchmark assessments are complete. Whew! Now that routines are in place, let the serious teaching and learning begin! 🙂 Here’s a little peek at our week in pictures for you. 🙂

I like to kick off my Writer’s Workshop with Scribble/Squiggle stories. It’s so fun for the kids and allows the students’ to not only write about something of their choice, but it lets them work at their own pace. Students who are ready to write can “go to town” on a story and students who are just working on a sentence can write one sentence about their picture to start. These Scribble Story writing sheets come from Lori Rosenberg’s Writing Menu. We started with these sheets and then moved to writing and drawing in our journals. They are off to a great start! 🙂

We focused on Character Traits in our mini-lessons. We started by identifying character traits about ourselves to fully understand what it means to discuss what a person is like “on the inside.” We made these quick little picture frames by cutting a hole in the paper, writing words that describe ourselves, and putting our face in it to act as a frame! 🙂

As we read stories all week, we added words to our anchor chart to describe all of the characters we “met” in our books. This poster is hanging in our classroom right now and we refer to it as we talk about characters within a text. (Look closely. She has 6 fingers. My kiddos were delighted to point that out to me of course haha!)

In science, we have been learning the meaning of the fancy words hypothesis and conclusion as we participated in some fun science experiments. We practiced our science roles of leader, recorder, material supervisor, and questioner as we worked in our teams. This was our swirled milk experiment. They were in awe! 🙂

On a personal note, my husband and I took this really cheesy picture beside the sign that is officially in our new yard! 🙂 Yeahh!! There are also a billion boxes in our current guestroom waiting for us to pack…maybe they will pack themselves….

Can you guess what I’ll be doing this weekend? 🙂