And, now, onto our First Day of First Grade.  Which is officially over, and it went surprisingly well. I say that because I was anticipating the transition from mommy to teacher to not be the easiest on either of us.  However, he showed up dressed and ready at 7am, with plenty of time to wake up and watch an episode of Chima before the school bell rang.   We didn’t finish everything in my plans, but that seems only natural on the first day of school.  I was always significantly over-planned for the first week of school when I was in the classroom, so I expected as much today.  Our Storybook Bible just arrived in the mail this afternoon, so I hope to begin that tomorrow.  

I started off by introducing this schedule to him.   If you don’t post your daily schedule in your classroom for your students, I highly recommend it.  It was very helpful for him to know what to expect and to mentally prepare of whatever activity was coming next.  Kiddos appreciate the structure and sequence.  {Ignore the times.  I made this as a loose guide before finalizing my lesson plans yesterday.}

Next was morning work taken from my Handwriting Makes Me Happy sight word handwriting pack.  I introduced some of these over the summer, so they weren’t entirely unfamiliar, but he was a little rusty.  No big deal.  Tomorrow, I will introduce him to three of the handwriting tasks associated with this activity.  We have all year to learn 😉

     

Since we didn’t get a chance to do our Scripture Study, it was on to our first Brain Break!  HE. WAS. SO. EXCITED. about these! Again, knowing that Break Breaks were on the horizon after he completed something was very helpful in keeping him on task today.  Tomorrow could be a different story, but it worked today!  I introduced him to Go Noodle and he was hooked instantly.  In fact, he preferred to revisit the site for subsequent Brain Breaks, too!

Calendar Math was courtesy of Cara at The First Grade Parade.  We completed his Calendar Binder insert together and probably will do it hand-in-hand for the rest of the week.  I crossed the things out that we aren’t ready to use yet (i.e. money, expanded notation, number sentence, etc.), and concentrated on being able to read the calendar to locate the date, month, day of the week, and year.  

This week, for spelling and phonics, we are concentrating on reviewing vowels.  If you don’t own The Teacher Wife’s cute little Glue Vowels resource, you *must* download it…FOR FREE!  We LOVE it.  Such an excellent visual for young learners and excellent way for the concept to stick.  Pun completely intended 😉