First Day of School

Today was the first day of school....(pause for effect). If you're a teacher you understand. I may stay awake long enough to finish this post.

Seventeen beautiful, energetic, smiling faces greeted me this morning. There was lots of nervous energy and excitement in the air. I promised myself to take LOTS of pictures. I did. For the first hour. Epic fail. 

I wanted to get our poetry notebooks ready first thing because I wanted Jitter Juice from Abby Mullins' Fun with Firsties resource to be the first poem we glued in there. So this morning the kids got busy right away coloring and cutting out labels for their composition books. 

Since we only add one poem per week in our notebooks, we dedicate the first part of a composition book to poetry and use rest as an interactive math notebook. Thus, one label on the front and one label on the back. 

This year I bought tons of stickers: Transformers, Skylanders, Hot Wheels, Disney Princesses, Bubble Guppies, Super Heroes, Sophia the First, and more to decorate our Poetry Notebook/Math Journals. 

This is mine. I keep one as an example and I add poems and other items along with the kids so I have a reference guide for what their notebooks should look like at any given time. Here is some of the kiddos' handywork. They were really excited about all thos stickers!

We read First Day Jitters and then Jitter Juice. I made a large anchor chart out of the poem and the kids highlighted sight words they knew and told me where they should go on our word wall (it goes under "I" on the word wall). Then, we added the poem to our poetry notebooks and the kids highlighted the words they knew. 

Then we had to have some Jitter Juice! Because of the Foods of Minimal Nutritional Value guidelines and food allergies I super simplified the recipe. I re-labeled some sparking water with a Jitter Juice label. Before my class returned from lunch I covertly squirted some blue raspberry flavoring (think MiO) into the bottom of some small clear cups. When the kids returned to the room I poured the clear liquid into the cups and they oooooohed and aaaaaaah-ed over the color change. 

 We went back into our poetry journal and wrote

I like jitter juice.

or

I do not like jitter juice.

underneath the poem. This gave me a quick glimpse of their handwriting, spacing, and letter positioning. Finally, we tallied who liked the juice and who did not. There were only two firsties that didn't like it. 

This is just about the only thing we got done today other than rules, expectation, procedures, more rules, more expectations, more procedures. You know the drill :-)

I'm going to TRY to make it back some time this week with a room tour and some pics of other classrooms on my campus that are super cute and functional at the same time! 'til then...