Hello Everyone! During calendar time this morning, I had the realization that ten days of school had passed before my very eyes. It seems like the first day was yesterday. Wasn't I at new teacher training a few days ago too? After this mind-blowing experience, I thought, "Wow, I really gave my blog a bad name. I'm not frolicking through first. I'm sprinting."
Then, I realized, "Oh hey, you haven't posted on that blog in a while because you've been so busy well...ummm...planning, planning, and ummm...more planning." That's how your first year truly is everyone out there. You plan for a week, but you never stick to that plan. Things always take longer or shorter than you expected. You need a back-up plan and a plan for your back-up plan. If you're not planning, then you're in a meeting of sorts. It could be a grade level "team meeting," a "school-wide staff meeting," a "new teacher" meeting (with a mentor....BEST meeting EVER!!! Use your mentor wisely.), and then there are other meetings that really depend on your school such as meetings with Title or ESOL. Don't get me wrong, I really do love meetings. That's all I did as a Senior Resident in college. Meetings with residents who broke the dorm rules, meetings with the staff members that I supervised, meetings with my area team, and meetings with my own supervisor. Meetings are incredibly informative and I love learning from professional development sessions because I'm always eager to improve my skill set. Meetings just take so much time and I find myself coming home with a lot of my work even though people tell me to "relax" and "have some down time." Teachers don't have a 9-5 job where they can experience this so called "down time." Teachers work long days. Mine starts at 5am and generally ends at 11pm.
So, here's my effort to reflect on my first 10 days of teaching and Open House. Open House occurs a couple days before the first day. This is a time when your room is packed with students and parents. They all want your undivided attention. Your tables start to look like shelves at Walmart due to the plethora of school supplies that are brought in for the school year. 20 boxes of tissue, 20 bottles of hand sanitizer, 20 composition notebooks, 20 glue sticks, 20 boxes of crayons, etc. You get the idea. I think I need to invest my money in Walmart stock.
Also, word of advice for new teachers; make a list of everything that you put a student's name on at the beginning of the year (desk, cubbie, coat hook, word study baggie, folders, etc). You will want this list at the beginning of each year, so you don't ask yourself, "Have I labeled everything that I need to label?"
Highlights from the first ten days:
1. Creating Hopes and Dreams- The students colored some of the most creative giraffes I have ever seen. Red ones, blue ones, and normal yellow ones with brown spots. You can see my teacher example in the pictures below.
2. Answering "What do you want from your teacher this year?"- This question was asked to get students to start thinking about what they wanted to learn in first grade and how I, as their teacher, could help them learn those things. Eventually, we would connect these ideas with their Hopes and Dreams along with the Class Rules because following the rules/ being a good student will help you accomplish your learning goals. As you can see from the chart picture below, my students solely want to learn about animals. Literally every animal under the sun. This may be in part to the fact that my room is jungle-themed. They probably think that I'm entirely knowledgeable about every animal they listed. I didn't have the heart to tell them, "Well, according to the curriculum, we learn about animals for approximately one week. There's no way I can teach you EVERYTHING about EVERY one of these animals." I guess I'm just going to have to incorporate some of these animals into guided reading group books and maybe some other literature based activities where they think they are learning about animals only, but my main intent is writing or sight words.
3. Learning about each other- Students love to share. It doesn't matter what grade you teach or even what workplace you're in. People generally love to share information about themselves. My kids had a great time talking about things they like, what they did over the summer, and their names. For names, we read Chrysanthemum and talked about how we are each unique (names, interests, looks, etc.). Then, they added different colored construction paper scraps to a name template that my TA traced on black construction paper for each of them. My example is found below in the pictures.
4. Creating Class Rules- As we brainstormed rules for our class, a HUGE list started to form. We had things like "listen to the teacher," "don't hit," "don't punch," "don't throw things," "be nice," and the list goes on and on. My favorite suggestion by a little boy was, "Take care of the teacher." :) So, we brought ones that were similar together like "don't hit" and "don't punch" and we turned it into "Respect each other." Our rules ended up being "Respect each other," "Be a student that SHINES," and "Take care of the things in our class." You can see our class rules poster below. Students drew examples of them following rules on index cards to go around the poster. And, I ran out of masking tape or you could see the pledge posted on the wall. Every student signed a pledge with their name and that meant that they would follow these rules all year.
I think those are my top activities/ memories from the first day. Other than, the story that most of you may have seen on my Facebook page. A little girl from my student teaching kindergarten class came up to me at recess and said, "Are you a first grade teacher now?" I said, "Yes. I'm very excited about it!" And she replied, "Good. I'm glad that you don't have to be bossed around anymore." Then she hugged me and ran off with her friends. Well, this was wonderful just reflecting a little bit on the first few days. Once my routine starts getting finalized and things start settling down, I will try to post more often, but for now.....here's to the next 170 days of school :)
