First Week Back

I love my new class!  I have a sweet group this year.  This is my first year trying Whole Brain Teaching, and I love it!  I wish I found WBT a long time ago.  It's pretty amazing.  I think my favorite WBT technique so far is "Teach-ok?"  I'm impressed with how long I'm able to keep my students engaged during lessons.  My kids really like the scoreboard too!  I can't wait to try other WBT techniques this year.

Here are some pictures from the first week of school.

We read The Kissing Hand and charted feelings we had before the first day of school.  I got the cute anchor chart idea from Once Upon a First Grade Adventure.  The students then cut out tracings of their hands, and wrote words to describe their feelings on them.

We made a dismissal graph during math on the first day.  We discussed which one had the most, which one had the least, how many more walkers than bus, etc.  I made the interactive graph with SMART Notebook.  2nd graders love using the SMART Board!

In reading this week, we learned about using context clues to help readers with unfamiliar words.  

I introduced the class to context clues by reading Baloney (Henry P.).  

The kids loved it!  It has fun words like "Zimulus" for pencil.

In science we started the What is a Scientist? unit.  Students drew what they thought a scientist looked like and wrote what they thought a scientist would say.   We then read Everyone is a Scientist and wrote down what a scientist does on chart paper.  I tried to copy Cara's anchor chart from First Grade Parade.  I definitely need to work on my charting and artistic skills!  I also implemented some things from 2nd Grade Ponderings' You are a Scientist! lesson.

I introduced my kids to our Super Improver door.  I finally printed the little grids and the students' names on sticky notes.  You can download the Word document I made for the sticky notes here, and you can read more about my Super Improver door on my previous Classroom Setup post.

I also put together my students' Homework/Daily folders this week. 

You can download my behavior calendars at my TPT Store.

That's it for now!  Happy Labor Day !