All Are Welcome

This morning I introduced something new: See, Think, Wonder, Write.  Every Tuesday and Thursday morning we will look at a picture and (eventually) will write about what we see, notice and wonder.  Today we talked about the first word "See" and answered the following questions: What Does it Look Like? What Do you Notice? Can you Describe It?  What Do you Observe?  This was our picture from today...tomorrow we will find out what it is!  Any guesses?  One suggestion was a lamp!

I read the book All Are Welcome and we discussed what we noticed about all of the different children on the cover of the book.  After reading the book, students worked on creating a self portrait.  

This afternoon after recess we had a class meeting and worked to develop our first class rule together:

Listen with your ears and your eyes.

First Day of First Grade!

Welcome Back! It was an awesome and BUSY first day of first grade.  We started the day with a morning meeting and reviewed the structure of morning meeting:

• Greeting 
• Share 
• Morning Message 
• Activity 

After snack we took a tour of the school and met some new folks!  We have a new Music teacher this year, Mr. Dave 

and a new Art teacher, Mrs. Mitchell.  

Mrs. Winn is also the new administrative assistant in our main office.  I read the book The Pigeon HAS to Go to School! and we talked about how we are feeling, what we are excited about and what we wonder about first grade.  First grade enjoyed their first music class with Mr. Dave, had recess and were introduced to our new "Quiet Time Bags."  The day ended with PE!       

Butterflies!

I apologize for the hiatus but I have been slowly recovering from quite a cold.  We have been busy in Kindergarten!  Over the long weekend all 6 of our butterflies emerged out of their chrysalises!  We enjoyed watching the butterflies in the classroom today and are hoping for sun so we can release them outside tomorrow. 

Today we started talking about community helpers.  We defined a community as as group of people who live and work together and helpers in our community as people how make our community safer, better and cleaner.  On Friday we will walk to Fire Station 4 and learn more about how firefighters are helpers in our community.

During Math today we talked about how we can use a number line or path to help us write number sentences.  I read Ready, Set, Hop by Stuart J. Murphy.  Two frog friends Matty and Moe compete to see how many hops it takes to get to the big rock.  If Matty hopped 5 hops and Moe hopped 2 more hops than Matty, then the score is 5 to 7. We used a number to keep track of the hops and write number sentences.

Shelburne Farms!

It was a super fun day at Shelburne Farms!  We were very glad that the rain help off and enjoyed the chicken parade, milking a cow, petting sheep, tasting cheese, and going a storywalk through the woods! 

Caterpillar on the loose...

This morning I opened the caterpillar jar to clear some of the 'webs' and didn't realize that one had gotten loose!  Luckily it was found and returned to the jar safely!