Keep Teaching and Planning!: Five For Friday- First Week of School!!

Whew!!! The first week is over and I am exhausted!!!!

Our numbers are crazy high this year (which is unfortunately a reoccurring pattern at my school), so I've got 28 firsties squeezed into my room! The other two general ed teachers are at 27 and 29, but our bilingual teachers are at 18 and 19!! Soooo jealous!! We're keeping our fingers crossed for a 6th teacher soon. I've managed to get some teaching in, even though we don't even fit onto our carpet! I'm linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching to share some pics from this week!!

Here we go!

I shared this picture on my facebook page, but this was my mountain of school supplies on the first day of school! I know a lot of you have wonderful systems for students sorting school supplies at Meet the Teacher, but it's rare that I have more than 2 or 3 families bring supplies to Meet the Teacher. Most of them bring them on the first or second day of school, and with 28 firsties all piling in between 7:00 and 7:30 am, my hopes of organization flew out the window! Can you see the green baskets buried under there?? That was my starting point for sorting, but they quickly were hidden by the mountain! Luckily, I recruited a former student of mine to come help me sort after school!!

We all have our go-to First Week of School books and I know The Kissing Hand is definitely on that list for a lot of teachers!! We read it and discussed all of our different feelings. I was so happy when my little friends were raising their hands and telling me that they were feeling "ready" or "awesome" or "super" on the first day of school! I love the excitement that first graders still have for school! We picked 5 of those feelings and made a graph of how we each felt- look how excited my class is!

We jumped right in this week with our math time! We are integrating new standards this year, since the TEKS are changing next year, so our lesson plans are going to be very different this year! We started off with ten frames, the concept of "10 and some more" and comparing numbers. We used this freebie from Jessica Travis and had a lot of fun with it.

Does your school use Kelso's Choices? Mine does, and while some teachers don't utilize it as much, I LOVE IT! We always start with discussions about Big Problems vs. Small Problems and make charts and class books about each. Then we learn about the choices we each can use when trying to solve a Small Problem. We have a poster in our room and I encourage the students to "take them to the poster" if they have an issue they want to talk about with another student. It's my go-to response for tattling and I love seeing them working out their problems together. Here's the link to Kelso if you ever want to check him out!

On Friday, I had a lot of fun activities planned and we almost finished them all!! We painted ten frames with Q tips (more about that in THIS post), made 'School is Cool' hats and read Chrysanthemum. After we read Chrysanthemum, we took a few minutes to think about our names. We talked about the number of letters in our names and went over the difference between vowels and consonants. We made these pages to hang outside our classroom, each with information about our own names. (I've been cutting letters off of cereal boxes, pop corn boxes and pizza boxes all summer and even got my teacher friends to save their boxes for me, too!) A few friends are still missing a few letters, so I'll be cutting more this weekend so we can finish up on Tuesday!! I've also got the animated version of Chrysanthemum from Weston Woods on United Streaming, and I know they'll love to watch that! Click here to get the name pages for yourself.

Thanks for staying with me through this long First Week post! Be sure to link up with Kacey and read all of the other great Five for Friday posts!! Just click the image below to go to her blog.