Back to School Potpourri

WARNING: Today's post has no real theme-it's a mish-mash of things from my classroom from the past couple of weeks!

So, the school year is underway! Today marked day 16. I stand by what I said in my last post-I have a class full of sweeties this year! I am up to 21 precious firsties and they are all SO smart. I've only made one cry so far, so that's something, too!

One of the first things we did this year was read Pete the Cat books. My favorite is Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes. (Funny side story: Little Miss loves ALL of the Pete books. Over the summer she discovered them and now knows them by heart...she has to take them all to bed with her now EVERY NIGHT. It's hysterical.) We did this adorable activity from The Bubbly Blonde . They came out so cute! We talked about the ways that we can "rock" this school year and then I gave them the sentence frame "I can rock first grade by..." Here is what the outside of my door looks like now, all decorated for our first PTO meeting next week:



I just love all the bright colors and the polka dots!

Next thing: math fun...we've been working on graphing. Most of our activies have originated from my graphing packet that is available on TpT, but I tried something a little different this year to introduce tallies. My group this year saw tallies in kindergarten, but I wasn't sure how comfortable they were with MAKING sets of tallies. In my experience what kids like to do is make a row of five parallel lines and THEN cross the fifth...sigh. So, this year I tried out the popsicle stick method that I have seen all over Pinterest. To put it concisely...WOW! Here are some pics of my little mathematicians in action:



Aren't they awesome? I just used a tally practice page freebie I found on TpT in Ms. Scmidt's shop. The kids paired up with a math buddy (because I didn't have enough sticks for everyone to have their own set) and traded off counting out popsicle sticks to match the number and arranging the set into groups of five with leftovers. It was a lot of fun and I was able to see pretty quickly who understood the concept (but had trouble making tallies), who understood the concept and could make tally marks correctly, and who didn't get the concept at all.

One last thing...today was Friday and my precious room mother sent in snacks for the kiddos. Here is the extra one she told me to bring home for Little Miss:


Isn't that precious?! And the snack featured animal crackers and gummy worms. (She put the giraffe on it because the kiddos are Mrs. Goggans' Giraffes...every class in the school has a banner with an alliterative name and that was the cutest thing I could come up with. There's not many cutesy animals for the letter "G," believe it or not! "Mrs. Goggans' Geckos" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?! Haha!)

That's all for this week...next week we're going to dig deep into our weather standard and wrap up graphing before the LONG WEEKEND!

1 comment

  1. Great minds think alike...:-) This was my first year using the popsicle sticks as well to teach tally marks. My kids enjoyed the experience and I only had about three students who still didn't understand the concept. I used the Tally it UP! activity sheet for an assignment grade later on that week.

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