Has it really only been four days?

Has it really only been four days since the kids came back??? I am exhausted!  I am teaching first grade again this year (yay!), Allison looped to kindergarten with her pre-kers from last year (lucky), and my sweet mom is braving pre-k for the first time (I know I could never do it).  Needless to say, bed time has come a lot earlier than any of us would like to admit this week.

I thought I would share a few pictures from our first few days.  I wish I had more, but I am struggling to remember to get out the camera...I need to get back in the habit.

First of all, I like to start the year off with an idea from Debbie Miller's Reading with Meaning book.  My entire grade level read this book a couple of years ago and we have integrated a lot of her ideas, but this is my favorite:

We generate a list of ideas as a class and then I incorporate the list into a little promise.  The kids then make self portraits and sign their name as a way of saying that "they promise."

Next, I have some pictures of a little math activity that I do every year during the first week.  I like to start the year by building number sense and working with a number line...so why not include a little art project?!

Here we are making number posters to hang in our classroom.  You can tell, right?  Ha!  We voted as a class to make bumblebees this year (at this point they are just yellow circles with a black head).  Each kid made some and then they had to come and place them on our number cards...the "1" card has one bee, "2" has two, all of the way to "25" (this is a great way for them to see the difference in numbers and it also guarantees that we make enough).  I take the bees and glue them on white paper with the corresponding number and number word...we add a few stripes and some wings, laminate, and voila!...a beautiful kid-created number wall for your classroom (I will post pictures of the finished product asap!).

We have also been doing a little "Number of the Day" practice.  Each student has a spiral bound notebook (cut in half) that they use every morning as part of their morning work.  They have to represent "Today's Number (the number of days we have been in school) in at least five different ways.  They start off the year with the number word, dots, etc, and they end the year doing some serious algebra...I kid you not.  Here are a few of my kids sharing what they came up with.

I'll be back with more pictures soon!