All About Me

Our This week was kind of all over the place because we still had to fit in 1 more staggered day for a few of our new friends while learning s out being bucket fillers and learning all about us. 

We learned about making good choices and being kind friends so we can be bucket fillers and we made happy little buckets to show that we will be try to make good choices. 

This week we will be learning all about ourselves and our friends and what makes us all special. One thing that makes us special is our names. 

We sang If Your Name Begins With ______ Please Stand Up and as they sold each child was handed the letter their name begins with. After we had everyone's letter we decorated them with stickers. 

We cut out the letter our name begins with from magazines and glued them into the middle of our letters. 

We read a story called Chrysanthemum and practices writing/tracing our names, counting how many letters are in our names. 

We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and created our own coconut trees, glued letter coconuts on our trees spelling our names. 

 We met Mat Man and learned all of the different parts of our bodies by drawing self portraits. 

Last but not least we made mosaic names so we could show off what makes us all special. 

We had such a great week at school and we can't wait to meet our first letter friend next week. 

All About Me

Well we officially survived the first full week of school. I am already so excited about this school year and we have barely even started. First I have to brag on my class a little bit because they are absolutely precious! They are so sweet and so well behaved that they make it easy to love them already. I am always excited about the first week of school because I get to know all of my students a little better and I get a jump start on assessing everyone so I can have a better starting point of how I can best tailor my lesson plans to make sure I am working on each and every single students level. You may think this is impossible with 22 students, but it is a skill any teacher can develop with lots of multitasking and a little creativity.

We kicked off our first week of school meeting a new friend who helped us learn all about the different parts of our bodies. If you haven't met him yet his name is Mat Man and he is a really useful guy. Since we are learning all about ourselves this week we will be drawing some self portraits and Mat Man wanted to make sure everyone wasn't leaving out any important parts like an arm or a foot. Throughout the school year our friends will draw several self portraits so we can look back and see what they have learned and how their skills have grown. You will be so amazed how all of our skills develop and change from month to month. I actually think that is my favorite part about being a teacher, well that and all of the sweet hugs! I love getting to be there when a friend has been working on a skill and they have that

After we met Mat Man everyone recreated their very own Mat Man by following my step by step instructions. Direction following is one of the many skills we will be working on throughout the entire year. 

 

On Tuesday we learned about something that makes each and everyone of us special! 

 Our Names!

We started off the day by playing a really fun game and a new song. Each week when we learn a new letter we will sing a song called If Your Name begins with (The Letter) Please Stand Up and whoever has a name that begins with our letter of the week gets to stand up and tell us about their name and their letter. On this day instead of just singing about 1 letter we sang our song and each time I would lay out colorful cards with our friends letters on and if I called their letter they would come up and get their card. Everyone did an awesome recognizing their letter and we had a blast singing our song. 

After we learned everyone's letter we watched a story called Chrysanthemum all about a little mouse who had a very long name. We learned how our words can hurt our friends hearts and that no matter if we have the same name or a different name we are all special because God made us exactly how he wants us to be. After watching the story everyone practiced tracing the letters in their names and then we counted how many letters were in them.

 On Wednesday we read the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. This is such a fun book to introduce all of the letters and my friends loved getting to yell Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. After finishing our story everyone made their very own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree, but their coconuts had letters on them and the letters spelt out their names. Everyone worked to spell out their names with their coconuts and then they counted how many letters were in their name and we transcribed the number.

 

On Friday we read a story of St. Theresa and how God used the stars to create spell out her name. St. Theresa knew it was God speaking to her and she knew God loved her. We talked about how God speaks to us and tells us he loves us everyday and how we can talk to God by praying to him each and everyday. Everyone decorated a beautiful star just like God used to spell St. Theresa's name.

 This week for jobs we worked on a  few different projects. Our first job was to decorate the first letter by using our fingers to peel off stickers and place them all over the first letter of our name.

Next my friends drew a self portrait and practiced tracing their names.

I think my favorite job this week was the self portraits each student created. They all turned out so cute and unique just like each one of my friends.

Last but not least everyone used their fingers to rip strips of paper to decorate the letters in their names.

Since this was our first week of jobs I we decided to take it easy and only rotate through 4 different activities so on Friday we completed our very first journal page. Since we have been learning all about ourselves and our names all week we decided to continue the trend with some more name letter tracing and one more picture of our cute selves.

Once again I am calling our first full week of school a win!!!!

All About Me

This week we are completing our first set of Jobs. You might be asking yourself what is a job exactly.  Well you're in luck because I am going to tell you all about it!

Basically each week we work on 4-5 different activities with each table completing 1 each day. Now you might be wondering how I keep up with 5 different tables completing 5 different activities all at the same time. 

 Welcome to my Jobs chart. On the board are the colors of the boxes each job is in. The colored squares that rotate are the table colors. Each day I rotate the Jobs down and whatever color each square is on is the box that they complete.

Everything that is needed for each job can be found in the box from pencils, stamps, dice, and 20 copies of each piece they may need to cut out. This means the entire week before we get EVERYTHING ready for the next week which takes a lot of work, but is 100% worth it. 

 Our beautiful Job boxes filled and ready to go.

Since we are learning all about ourselves this week I wanted to spend the majority of our time learning about our names and making self portraits. 

For our first job I had everyone at the table work as a team to listen to Mat Man's song and then put all of the pieces together to make his body. 

After they completed this task I had them go back to their seats to draw a self portrait. 

Next I wanted to see how everyone did with writing their names and recognizing the letters in their names so we Traced, Stamped, and Wrote them. 

We worked on cutting and direction following when we created our Self Portrait People.

And we put the letters in our name in order by creating pictures if ourselves and using the buttons to spell our name. 

Our last Job was to work with Mrs. Douglas on our scissor handling and cutting skills.

I would like to say that our first week of Jobs has been very successful and I am so happy with all of my little smart cookies. I am looking forward to telling my friends all about our Letter Friends and next week we will be learning about our very first letter of the year!

What's In A Name

This week we are learning All About Me. No not me, but all about Ourselves. We started out the week by reading I Like Me by Nancy Carlson

After reading the story everyone got a chance to come up and find the letter their name begins with and place it in our graph while we sang If Your Name Begins With____ Please Stand Up.  We counted how many of each letter and then we placed them in order form the greates to the least. 

We talked about how our names are special to us even if someone else has the same name. I told everyone we would be learning how to read and write or names this year and to start we were going to make mosaics if our names by placing colorful squares over each letter. We worked on starting on the first letter and working from left I right. Everyone did an awesome job finishing their work and making their names. 

Just realized I have 2 of the same picture in that there collage!



Today was also the day we started doing our afternoon jobs. It's a little hectic the first few weeks, but once everyone gets the hang of doing different work at the same time we will be on a roll!

All in all week 2 has started off great and we have nowhere to go, but up from here!!