We have completed our first week back to school for the 2015-2016 school year. It has been a great week! I've been completely exhausted by the end of each day, but I have absolutely loved my new school and love my class!
The first day was a half day so we kept our homeroom classes that day and the next full day. We wanted to have time to bond with our homeroom and go over procedures before beginning to switch classes.
Our very first read aloud for the year was "First Day Jitters". I love this picture book and use it every year with my upper elementary friends. We all have those jitters on that first day!
We started Morning Meeting on the very first day. I love doing Morning Meeting with my fifth graders. It's such a good time to build community in your classroom. We started off very simple with a greeting and a prayer on the first day of school. It's been awesome to incorporate prayer into Morning Meeting! The second day we began sharing by sharing Me Bags.
We played several getting to know games. One was a card match up game where each student had a word on half an index card and they had to find their match. We used words & phrases like macaroni and cheese, baseball and bat, etc. We also used a beach ball with questions on it to get to know each other better.
We read the story "Each Kindness" and shared how we can spread kindness to others and why we should. It really tied well into topics discussed at a welcome back assembly.
We spent time going over procedures, rules, expectations, etc. I really enjoyed getting to know my students through our Me Bag activity. It's going to be a great year!
We read some of "Sideways Stories for Wayside School" during the first couple of days. Since our first genre study is Fantasy, it was a good intro to that and allowed the students to get a little preview of it.
I'll be back tomorrow to share what we did in Reading and Social Studies during the first week!
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