Monday, August 8, 2016

First Day Name Search

Today was our first day back! We only went a half day, but it felt like a full day! Whew! 19 kiddos coming in with parents and Santa toy sack of supplies! It was wonderful to see so many happy faces enter my classroom! I always seem to forget how little they are at the beginning of the year and how we REALLY need to dig in to procedures. The first half day was all about welcoming them and getting to know each other. Tomorrow is when it becomes the real deal! Hope I get a good nights sleep tonight!
So this morning began as expected, lol. Our online attendance system was down which had me calling the office multiple times trying to figure out what to do! There's always something! I was so very proud of my students. I was worried that all control would be lost, but they stayed on task.  Now that is a welcoming thing to see on the first day. Our intercom system was also down which meant no announcements and a dlight difficulty with early dismissal.  We pulled through! :)

Here's a peek of what we did today...

I wrote all of my students' names in the easel in a word search. We cheered and laughed as each student circled their names! I told them I tried to trick them and that there was no way they'd find their names! This was so amusing to them! They proved me wrong! :) We discussed that they best strategy for finding our names was to look for the first uppercase letter since all names begin with an uppercase letter! Of course this activity was easy for them, but it also helped them to start learning each other's names.

We read the book, The Night Before First Grade and identified the rhyming words. 

On parent night which was a week before school began, I gave parents a sheet to fill out with their children the night before the first day. They had to draw a picture of how they felt, what they did, what they hoped their teacher would be like. After reading the story, the children shares these with their new classmates.  I got a lot of "I hope my teacher is nice, sweet, smart, and funny."  I hope I lived up to their expectations! :)  Find the freebie here
No first day would be complete without first day pictures of course! 

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