Chester

Chester the Raccoon is afraid of leaving his mom and going to school.  She teaches him to touch his cheek with the palm of his hand after she kisses him there.  That way, her kiss will stay with him all day long and every time he misses her he can feel her kiss.  On the last page,  it shows the sign language for "I love you" with your hand.  I teach my students this sign, and every time we leave each other, we can communicate this without talking.  I still have fourth grade students who show me the sign when I see them in the hallways. 

Be a bucket filler

Another book we read at the beginning of school teaches students what to say and how to act to be a bucket filler instead of a bucket dipper.  Here are some pictures of the activity we did with it.

David Goes to School

We are learning all about rules at school this week.  One of my favorite books is David Goes to School.  We make an anchor chart of how we can be Peacemakers at school.  Students came up with some very good ideas.  Then we made "David" and pledged to be peacemakers at school.

First Day Back

My goal this year is to do more blogging!  Today was a lot of muscle power getting all my furniture moved back into the proper places.  I made some changes that I think will be great.    I love my new first grade neighbor.  We went "shopping" in the portables to get any discarded furniture into her classroom. We had the dolly and flat bed loaded up several times!  There is so much more to do tomorrow.  I hope to get my "stuff" laminated that I have been printing off from Teacher's Pay Teachers and Teacher's Notebook all summer long. 

fairy tales

What a fun day it was on Friday!  Come by and see pictures of the students all dressed up.  I am headed to print them right now!  I did not have them cover their faces, or I would have had pictures of them posted here.

pillars of character

I hope you will take the time to read what the students came up with for our circle maps on  pillars of character.  They are really amazing!  We are working on these in our classroom.  You could probably print these from this blog if you wanted to reinforce these at home, too.

The Little Red Hen

What better way to retell a story than to make a story board.  We have some budding artists in our classroom.  What precious animals they drew!  They loved adding the speech bubbles to their animal.  Everyone in the whole class had their very own part.  This was one of the activities we did in our study of fairy tales. 

patterns

Wow!  You can see how sophisticated we have become making patterns.  Now they are 3 dimensional. In the next couple of weeks, we are going to do additive patterns as well as number patterns (counting by 10's, 5's, and 2's).  Stay tuned to see those! 

observational writing

In writing, we are using tree maps to help us get ideas for observational writing.  Students are being really creative to come up with some of their own ideas.

Observable Properties

As scientist, we are learning to observe objects by mass, size, color, texture, and shape. We had fun using these properties to observe a rubber ducky and a small ball.