My First Day...and a winner!

Today was my first day back to school with students....and boy am I tired!   We had a good day though, and my kids seem to be super sweet so hopefully we will be off to a great year!  (it is the "honeymoon phase" right now, so time will tell...but I have a good feeling about this class.)

Anyway, I know that the first day of school is always pretty nerve-wrecking and planning what to do can be hard, so I thought I would share my first day plans with you.  There is nothing here that is mind-blowing...just all regular first day stuff!

15 mins  5th Grade Survey
   The students come in and begin filling out this survey that I place on the desks.  I let them sit wherever they wish on the first day of school.  This serves two purposes.  1) It lets me see who is friends the whom.  2) It gives me a chance to let them freely choose the seats and if it works, things are fine.  If not, I get a peek into how the class will work together.  Click here to get the survey for yourself.


10 mins  Welcome and Greeting
   At this time I like to introduce how I will greet the students each day.  Here is the video of me doing it  from a few years ago.

40 mins  Who Are You?
   I am doing something a bit different with the name tags this year.   I want them to be sort of "graffiti style" so we began with reading The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown.  I then had them create a Circle Map of all the things that they thought were important about themselves.  We will use this tomorrow to create our name tags (and I will elaborate a bit more when they are done!)

40 mins  Classroom Rules
    I had the students brainstorm a list of things they thought would make great rules in our room.   They came up with all sorts of things, from no running to don't talk when the teacher is talking.  We then came up with 5 "umbrella rules" that would encompass most of the little rules they came up with.  Tomorrow we will use the Circle Map to sort the little rules under the main umbrella rules.  (for the full lesson, see this post here...you can also get the templates to use in your classroom.)

15 mins  Yard behavior/rules and line order

20 mins  Recess

25 mins  Calendar Math
    I introduced Calendar Math here.  We went over the first day and I started to get them into the routine.  See here for a better explanation of it all.

40 mins   Classroom Economy
    I went over my classroom economy with the students.  They are SO into  it this year and can't wait to start earning...which is awesome!

40 mins  Lunch

20 mins   Silent Reading

30 mins   Hand Prints
    I am taking some inspiration from that pin with the hands on the blue background (that I can not find to save my life right now) and we are going to make a sort of class welcome sign with these hand prints.  Today, I had the students trace their hand and using the circle map we made earlier in the day, they started to illustrate the hands with things that are near and dear to them.  Tomorrow we will use those to make a mural (again, I will elaborate later when it is done)

20 mins  Clean Up, get homework ready, etc....

So that was my day today.  I took things slowly and didn't pressure myself to fill my bulletin boards and go over every.single.thing that makes my classroom run.  We didn't get anything actually completed, but we did have a nice, productive day getting things started.  :)

And with that, here is the winner for the Carson Dellosa giveaway.  Congratulations Heather W!  Be sure to email me soon!!