Wow! What a great first week of school. I really enjoyed our first 3 days together. I am so impressed with my new first graders. We have been getting to know each other and our classroom routines. I must say that they all were very quick in learning procedures.
Last week we read many stories about the first day of school and being a good friend. One story that we read is called Have You Filled a Bucket Today? In this book we learn that everyone walks around with an invisible bucket and that we can fill each others buckets by doing and saying kind things. We have decided to be a classroom full of bucketfillers, not bucket dippers. Bucket dippers are bullies and other people who are not kind. You can learn more about the book HERE.
Last week we also began learning about Daily Five and Math Daily 3. Daily Five is the structure that I use to organize our literacy block. In our classroom we do not do centers, instead we work on five meaningful literacy tasks that we self-selcet as the teacher works with small groups of students on one-on-one with a child. The tasks are Read to Self, Work on Writing, Read to Someone, Word Work, and Listening to Reading. Each choice is explicitly taught and modeled with the class and then we practice and build stamina. New choices are not added until we are able to work for at least 10 minutes independently at our choice. Math Daily 3 consists of the same structure, but it has different choices. These are Math by Myself, Math with Someone, and Math Writing. I am going to be sharing more about these at open house.
This coming week we will continue to build our stamina during Read to Self and Math by Myself. We will also dive into our writing program and learn about where writer's get ideas from. Please contact me at any time if you have any questions or concerns.
