1st Two Weeks

I survived the first two weeks of school.
We have been busy. I am implementing so many new things in my room this year. I spent a lot of time this summer reorganizing all of my things and preparing them by standard. Our district finally gave us the go ahead to teach and do what we know is best for our kids. Such a novel idea...so we are about to start training on project based learning. I will keep my thoughts to myself and relish in the few weeks I got to do what was best for my students. I have gained an enthusiasm for teaching again in being allowed to TEACH! I love it!

We worked on classification of plants and animals for two weeks. We broke out our little eyes as we call them and got some closeups of our leaf margins and vein patterns.

We created crazy hair self portraits. We are finally getting an art unit and I am so happy. I do the best I can with art, but I will gladly hand that task over to a trained professional. 

One of the first days, we read Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon and talked about the importance of being yourself.  We then talked about what all we could offer each other in our little (25 strong) classroom community. The students drew flowers and wrote a sentence about themselves on each petal. They were instructed to do no less than five and no more than 7.  Easily, I could see who could follow directions. I also knew who could write sentences. 

 We worked heavily on math centers, rotating, volume, and directions. I do math centers all year so having a strong foundation in them is crucial. I need them to be able to work in small groups with each other while I have a group. We worked really hard on this. We also began number talks and were focusing on making tens which tied right into our review of place value and building numbers through 1000. We also threw in some rounding and they GOT the rounding rap! I LOVE the rounding rap!!!!

 We are using our space to it's max. They have a strong foundation of our rules, my expectations, how to celebrate each other, and we have already learned so much!