Week 2, check!

I can't believe how quickly the past 2 weeks have gone by! I'm actually looking forward to a full 5 days in a row with the kiddos, I love to be in a routine almost as much as the kiddos benefit from being in one. A 3 day week followed by a 4 day week leaves me feeling a little unorganized, however, the past 2 weeks have been pretty great!

First of all, I want to share the fabulous "Looking Back on Summer" craftivity and self portrait activities we did during week 1 while we were getting to know each other...

Loved how these Looking Back on Summer Sunglasses craftivities came out!!! The did such a good job and a lot of my kiddos really impressed me with their writing! I wished I had used the worksheets without sentence frames for some of my kiddos but it was too soon in the year to be familiar with their writing abilities. Get your copy by clicking the picture above!

I combined this craftivity with my favorite beginning of the year activity from last year... hands and feet self portrait. I have the kiddos trace their hands and feet and then draw their body in between. Some of the portraits came out fabulously!

 

 I combined their sunglasses craftivity and self portraits for a really fun and bright hallway display that I'm hoping my kiddos parents will love on back to school night!

As for week 2, the 2nd grade team dove into the curriculum. I loved having my promethean board to help in math! I was able to save a flipchart to use as tens and ones base ten blocks. The kiddos can come up to the board and move the tens and ones blocks to create given numbers. Not super skillful with the board yet, but I was proud of that achievement!

I also signed my kiddos up for Xtramath which one of my wonderful collegues introduced me to last year. If you've never heard of it, check it out... free for teachers and the kiddos can use it at home. It's math fact practice that is adaptable based on how the kids do. They can even see a chart of how they're doing on each math fact. Teachers also get reports each week sharing each students' progress.

If you are a 1st through 5th grade teacher this is a fabulous FREE resource to use in your classroom. Not only does this program have addition and subtraction facts but also multiplication and division.

Now a little on writing...my new district's writing curriculum is all about WRITER'S WORKSHOP... and ironically I am taking "The Writing Process" class as the first class of my grad program on reading and language. We haven't actually started the real meat of writer's workshop, our first unit mostly introduces writer's workshop with mentor texts and anchor charts but I am SO excited (and a little overwhelmed) to begin writer's workshop. For those of you who are starting writer's workshop or are interested in writer's workshop I'd HIGHLY recommend reading Writing Workshop The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi. It is helping me to have a better idea of how writer's workshop will look in my class.

Finally, a little WBT... I learned on Thursday that I am not the only whole brainer in my building! One of the 5th grade teachers is starting to use WBT this year and I am SO excited to pow wow with her soon! My kiddos are getting really good at everything that is WBT, especially "Teach, Okay" they quickly turn to their partner and discuss the question, etc. The only thing we need to work on more is the volume level when they turn to teach. They tend to get pretty excited and are VERY loud with that excitement. I'm not worried though with it only being week 2 :)

Alrighty, can't wait to catch in next week. Might not be until the weekend again though because with the new curriculum (for me) and grad school oh and the wedding 5 weeks away!!!... life is very crazy right now :)

Until next time...