Our First Few Weeks

We have been so busy during our first two weeks of school. Routines and rules have been reviewed daily and many community building activities have been incorporated throughout the days. Reading groups will begin for our first graders next week, so until then, the last two weeks have been filled with reading and literacy activities surrounding several books. Here are a few literacy activities we have done this week:

To encourage positive behavior at recess and get our students thinking about playing safe and fair, we read The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neill.

Next we developed a list of safe activities and games to play at recess. Then our students chose one activity they like best and completed the writing activity below. We are going to make a class book with the completed papers and when a student is having a difficult time finding an activity to do at recess or needs some guidance on making good choices at recess he/she can read the class book. This book will also be great when there is a new student. We can buddy up the new student with another student and they can read the class book together!

Click here to download

We also did a book comparison of The Little Red Hen and The Little Ren Hen Makes a Pizza. We used these books to introduce characters to kids, and then they picked their own favorite character to draw a picture of. For those higher kids, we also incorporated a sentence or two about the character.

Click HERE for The Little Red Hen character activity sheet

The following day we did a whole group retell of both stories then came up with a list of other things The Little Red Hen could make. Our students then completed a writing describing what they think The Little Red Hen should make next. They came up with some great ideas!

Click HERE to get a copy!

In math we've been reviewing numbers 1-20 with our first graders, and we've done some really fun things with our All About Numbers Pack. We introduced our 5 in a Row game and loved watching the kids work together. We used it to have the kids draw a dumber card out of the bowl in the middle, and then they just had to color in that number. It was a great review of numbers, and really worked on working together as a group.

We've also used the number cards to work on ordering numbers to make giant number lines for the kids to use to help them with counting. We didn't want to use the ink to print out so many colored versions, so we just printed them on colored construction paper and it worked great! We also did the same thing with our counting cards included in the pack, but it's been so busy calming these LARGE classes that we have, that we weren't able to snap any pictures. That's on our list though!

Click the picture below for numbers 11-30.

We had our students cut, order, and glue the numbers

on large sentence strips taped together.

We're trucking along in Daily 5, and have worked really hard this week on read to self and picking good fit books. Glad to say that we're up to about 10 minutes of stamina! It's amazing how much it improves once the kids get their own book boxes in their hands. This is our 3rd year doing Daily 5, and we just love it more every time we introduce it. We'll have more to post on Daily 5 later. We've made some great charts to reinforce the expectations, so keep watching as we will be sharing them shortly!


We ended the week with Jitter Juice from Abby's Fun With Firsties pack. There really are some GREAT activities in there! Since we had a hard time getting our hands on the book First Grade Jitters we weren't able to do it until the end of our second week. We introduced the poem, looked for our word wall words for the week, and did an extra writing piece. Since we did in after we'd been in school for a bit, we came up with a new writing activity. Click on the picture for your copy.

As we've been watching all of the other fabulous blogs out there, our jealousy of artistic talent is growing. Neither one of us can draw to save our life, and we are just in awe of those who can. But, we've figured out how to make our anchor charts almost as cute. We'll share those next week! Hope everyone has a fabulous weekend! We deserve it!