This week in first grade: 1/3 - 1/7, 2011

I have a friend who is a psychiatric nurse in a New York City hospital. She used to be a first grade teacher in a school in East Oakland (with me). Her two professions are not as disparate as you might think! Nevertheless, she frequently expresses a desire for MORE DETAILS on my teaching activities, and since I won't get too specific about classroom-related stuff on Facebook, I promised her that I would try to do more school stuff here on the (ostensibly anonymous to the outside world) blog. So, NYC-Nurse, this is for you! And, I'll try to do a weekly classroom post for the rest of the school year.

This week in first grade....

 When I got to school on Monday morning, it looked like this! Monday was a work day for teachers, so there were no kids to disturb the pristine whiteness. By Friday there was still some snow on the grass in front of the buiding, and a nice little skating rink on an area of the playground wood chips that is permanently in shadow.

This is how I left my desk over vacation - not too terrible.

This is what it looked like after I had been working for an hour on Monday!

 The reading table looked like this when I came in on Monday morning. It was actually even CLEAN (as in, WASHED!) thanks to the moms who helped out at our holiday hot chocolate party.

Sadly, before very long it looked like this.

 The counter behind the reading table was in pretty good shape!

 The "finished work" basket was pretty scary, though... no, I didn't review/file stuff before winter break.

 A really nice thing about the Monday prep day was that my team got to go out to lunch together! This WAS a working lunch, as you can see.

 On Tuesday we were back to the routine, exchanging books in our independent reading book bags.  Can you see the snow outside the window?

 Doing "morning work" - typically math or reading review worksheets that give the kids something relevant to to while I do attendance and lunch count, sort out the take-home library books, etc.

The next thing on our agenda each day is the "morning message," where we do shared reading/writing, grammar and phonics practice, etc. One kid is the "helper" each day for the message and for calendar time.   After we're finished we hang the message in the hallway right next to our door.

Our current math topic is on measurement and geometry, so we broke out the geoboards:

We did some shared writing on "Ways We Help," "Healthy Snacks" and instructions for "Riding a Bike":

 Every week we work with data:

 We did a two-way sorting diagram for age and gender.

 We also did a bar graph on our favorite snow activities.

 On Friday afternoons we have "Star Time" where we get out Legos, blocks, board games, Play-Doh, and other fun stuff for a half an hour of exploration and play.

 And there are the highlights of the week!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)