Figuring new things out always takes time, practice, and a lot of patience.  This week we're getting to know our first grade routines, friends, and teacher.  We're also remembering what school is all about.  Today we practiced some literacy centers again.  We reviewed the short a sound (like in apple) and some high frequency words.  Even though this is an easy sound, it's important to practice working hard and working independently before we learn new things!

Sometimes the best way to have fun is to get your hands dirty.  We make a lot of messes in first grade, so we figured we may as well start out with a big one right off the bat.  Miss Kylie loves the children's book author and illustrator Eric Carle.  His artwork is especially cool!  He makes large sheets of paste paper and then uses that paper to create the animals in his books.  

And we heard from a few more friends and their All About Me Bags.  We're finding out so many new things and now we have lots of conversation starters for lunch and recess!

We started to practice literacy time in the classroom.  We usually call it centers.  During this time we're each working independently on different activities depending on what we're reading and what we're interested in.  Today we each did the same activities, but we could work at our own pace. It was challenging to pace ourselves based on how much time we each need and not what our friends need.  This is a skill we'll work on all year.

Here we are reading books, alphabetizing, responding to literature,
​and reviewing short vowels.

And of course we heard from a few more friends and their All About Me Bags.

Today, we got a chance to practice our math skills.  Miss Kylie thought we'd be rusty after the summer break, but it turns our we're ready to jump right in!  We played a few addition games with dice and dominoes and practiced what it's like to play math games in the classroom.  Now we're ready for some real challenges.  

We had the chance to hear from another six of our friends and their All About Me Bags. 

Today was just THE BEST.  We spent some more time getting to know each other and even had a chance to work as teams in a big challenge.  Miss Kylie took a step back and told us we had to be the teachers to get this challenge done.  The goal was simple.  Stack six cups in a pyramid with your team.  The challenge...don't touch the cups with any body part... We got to use:
six cups  one piece of ribbon  two rubber bands  scissors  two straws
We had to work in small groups to make it work.  It was HARD, but oh so fun.  

Working in groups is tricky and we're going to do it a lot this year.  We have to take time to hear each other's ideas and agree or disagree.  Check out these awesome videos of us working together and teaching each other.

We also had a chance to hear from three of our friends and their All About Me Bags.  We can't wait to learn about the rest of our friends next week.

It's such an exciting time of year...new grade, new classmates, new teacher, new classroom, new friends, and so much new to learn.  We're going to be very busy in the first grade classroom and this is where you can come and check out all the action.  For the next couple weeks we are going to spend a lot of time getting to know each other, building a classroom community, and just figuring this first grade thing out. 

Today, we read the book Rainbow Fish.  It's a classic.  We spent some time reflecting on what we can share with our first grade class to make our community a better place.  We found out we're each pretty unique and we're going to have a lot to learn from one another.  Together we created a beautiful first grade rainbow fish to help us remember this sense of community this year.

We got to know our friends out on the big playground and enjoyed some fresh air.

And we even found some time to explore the classroom library and delve into some good books.

Thank you for a fabulous first day.  
It's going to be the BEST YEAR EVER!