Happily Ever After...

We are so happy to announce that Miss Thomas has tied the knot! On Saturday, September 29^th Miss Thomas became Mrs. Frost.  She celebrated on a beautiful day with her family, friends, co-workers and even a few of our students.

Our class made her a special book while she was out titled, “Our Wishes for the Mrs.” It made her smile and laugh out loud! 7 year olds certainly have a way with words, and kid spelling is always entertaining! 

Back to School Night

So Back to School Night, or Open House as some schools call it, can be a stressful night for teachers. Here in room 11, we like to keep things fun! It is a time to meet our students’ parents and show them just a little bit of who we are and what we will be doing with their children this year. It is a time to show our creative side and give the parents a sneak peek into their child’s school experience inside our classroom. Here are few things that take the stress out of the night for us. First, it helps to think of a theme for the night. I just happened to find these cute little parent gifts to put on the desks as a thank you and, our theme was born.

Packages of popcorn with this cute card stock label were a great thank you to the parents for “popping in” to our back to school night and a great inspiration for our movie inspired theme.

Continuing with your theme, you can have your students create original art work for their parents to take with them. This way they have something to document the beginning of their child’s school year (handprints and/or photos are great). As a teacher they are easy to do, and as a parent they make great keepsakes to look back on! Display their work in a fun way so that the parents can see their great work, and know that you are just as excited about their projects as they are.

Our big marquee sign with the Title “A Year to Remember” was the perfect way to display our students self written bio’s that we knew their parents would enjoy reading.

We even did a version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the floor leading up to our classroom door.

This worked out great! Not only did this display get a lot of attention, we also managed to give parents a photo of their child with their handprints to document their start of second grade!

Don’t forget to do something inside your room too! I try to always have something that will make the parents feel like their children are right there with them! We try to create something fun that the parents will enjoy seeing and or doing. I learned from several teachers (when I started teaching) that it is always fun to have the parents find their child’s desk. You can use clues that the students leave on their desk, you can make paper bodies of the students to help them, or you can do a little of both. We like to give our parents written hints as well as visual. We have our students make foam faces that look like them and then place a face on each of their seats. In addition, the we have the students complete a "Who am I?" page that gives clues to parents in order to help them find their child’s seat in our room. These serve and the duel purpose of covering their name tags so the parents can't peek! :)

With the help of our clues, and the sometimes uncanny resemblance of their foam faces, parents were easily able to find their little ones' seats in the room. All while having some laughs along the way!

Making your presentation fun is another way to relieve some stress. It’s important to remember that Back to School Night is not parent teacher conference night. This is a night to let your students’ parents know a little bit about you, and what to expect of their child this year. 

We use a PowerPoint presentation to help keep us on point, and to ensure that we don’t miss any important information. We add a little music to make it fun, we stop and talk (we make sure to not read the slides, but just talk about them as we go). We also like to feed our parents. Parents are just like kids, they are usually a whole lot nicer when they are not hungry! They love to munch on goodies like the soft pretzel tray that Miss Thomas brings every year, or some good old fashioned home-made cookies. 

This year’s Back to School Night was a success for us. We had a GREAT turnout and enjoyed meeting all of our students’ parents, and even got a few visits from some former students’ and some former parents. I even had a visit from a former student who is now in high school! Wow, that makes me feel old!

We hope that you have a great Back to school night too. Please share any ideas that you do to make this night a fun one!

Exploring The Daily Five

I know we mentioned earlier that we would be incorporating Daily Five into our classroom, so far it seems to be going well.  I took this picture of our Daily Five Lesson the other day.  Mrs. Biel explained how to choose the right book when you are reading independently.  

She compared it to choosing different shoes for different occasions.  For example, if you were going hiking you wouldn't pick the high heels, even though they are pretty (and many of our little divas wanted to pick them for every scenario!), they aren't practical.  They would make it harder for you, just like when you go to read a book that is too hard or doesn't interest you, it's not a "good fit."  We are hoping this sinks in when they are reading independently so they will recognize when a book they choose doesn't quite "fit" them :)  These are the factors that we are emphasizing when they go to choose their book...

I found this book idea, hopefully we can share this with the kids sometime this week, it talks about too hard, too easy & just right books!  

We also introduced them to the word "stamina."  We discussed what it means and used it in a few different contexts.  We explained that each day we will be doing some "reading to self" practice, and each day the time we read will get a little bit longer because we are building STAMINA :)  They are already up to eight minutes, we are so proud of them!

Details, Details, Details...

The first few days of school are always filled with going over our daily routine, classroom rules, handing out materials and tending to the dreaded paperwork.  No matter how prepared you think you are, there is always something (aka a million things) that come out of nowhere and appear on your "to do list."  You honestly want to take a massive sharpie marker and put a big X over all of it, unfortunately this wouldn't be efficient ;)  This is such a better idea than our 50,000 post it notes all over our desks...

On the first day, we went over all the basics with our new class...how to unpack, where to put our lunches/lunch money, what to do if you get finished your work early, classroom rules & expectations, etc...  

As far as behavior plans go, we use a "stoplight behavior chart."  Each magnet has a student's name on it.  If they break the rules they have to move their magnet from green to yellow and then, if it continues, from yellow to red.  We always give them a warning before they move their magnet.  If they move their magnet to yellow they have to sit out of recess for five minutes.  Moving their magnet to red causes them to lose recess completely and we send a note, or call, home to let the parents know.  

We printed these yellow and red cards to send home in the event any of the students have to move their magnets just to keep the parents up to date.  We used to have them color their stop light at the end of each day, but we found that it took up a lot of time and wasted a lot of paper so we're sampling out sending home pre-printed yellow & red behavior cards.

This has worked for us in the past so hopefully we won't have to change it this year.  They really, really like their recess so usually it's a good motivator!  

This is such a cute book, I think we will definitely be reading this in the next week or so to review, and to have a few laughs of course! :)

We are already starting our Back to School Night projects, I can't believe how fast September is going!  We will be sure to take many pictures so that you can get a better idea of what our classroom looks like, the activities and projects we are doing throughout the year!  

Back to School Fun

So we have had a very eventful first week back to school!  We have to admit, getting back into the routine after a summer filled with pool parties, beach days and barbecues can be a little rough.  Walking into this little gift from Mrs. Biel made the first day much more enjoyable for all of us :)

Don't worry, we made sure to have a little something for the students too, we didn't want to them going hungry on their first day!    

Along with the anxiety of packing lunches, gathering back to school supplies and adjusting the kids, and yourself, to waking up before the sun is out, there is also the outfit issue...."What should I wear? "What should they wear??"  I couldn't help but share these pictures of Mrs. Biel's daughters...their back to school outfits were too cute!  Check out Tootoo Cute Tutus for these outfits, and A Very Special Bow by Jenna for the fabulous hair accessories....

As hard as it was coming to the realization summer was over, as soon as the students entered the room we realized we were ready to be back!  We have already done so many fun things with our class, I'm going to have to save that for another day, it's getting late!  Just out of curiosity, what was your child's favorite part about going back to school?

So long summer....

After a rainy Labor Day weekend, summer is officially over!  Last week we finished putting our classroom back together again, and we are trying to think about what we will do differently this school year. 

One change we are thinking about is creating more open space in our room.  We love little nooks and learning spaces, but we also want to have plenty of open space for groups of children to work together.  We are big fans of using centers to reinforce the skills we are learning each week, and these require more space for everyone to spread out.  This gives the students the opportunity to move around and work with other kids in the class.

We will also begin to incorporate The Daily Five into our classroom.  It is a structure that helps students develop the daily habits of reading, writing, and working independently.   The goal is to enhance the students' ability to monitor their own comprehension while allowing them to have choice and ownership over their learning. 

Here are some skills we will be working on this year…

The students will learn to choose books on their level, check for understanding as they read and begin reading independently for longer amounts of time.  In order to make sure the students are not out of their seats 5,000 times throughout the day, they will each have their own book bins (with books on their level) within reach.  We are thinking of allowing them to have time on Fridays to select the books for their bins each week, this will give them the ability to choose books based on their interest. 

To help them decide which Daily Five activity they would like to choose, we will have their choices displayed where they can see them.  Maybe something like this?

 

It will be interesting to see how the students handle having so much independence in their learning as the year goes on!  We will, of course, be modeling, modeling, modeling to show them appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, reading comprehension and writing strategies. I’m sure there will be a lot of trial and error (on both our parts) but hopefully a lot of laughs and success stories as well!

As we continue cleaning and remodeling, I'm sure we will have more to add! What changes do you plan to make this year? Do you have advice for those who are just getting started?