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Friday, September 9, 2011

One week down, and I’m still standing!




   Well,  we all survived the first week of school.  If this year goes anything like the first four days, I think it will be a great one. 

  A little bit about our first week:

The day before the big day, I took some time to prepare some frog cupcakes and some Magic Play dough.   While I am not a big fan of giving my students sugary cupcakes, I found a great picture on Pinterest that motivated me to make some for our first day.  Here is a picture of my final product:



The students loved this special treat.


The Magic Play Dough idea came from  Jenn Bates of the, Finally in First blogl .  I followed a do it yourself play dough recipe that I found online (HERE). I found that I ended up needing to double the recipe in order to have a decent size dough ball for each student.

Here are the dough balls for 18 students using a single recipe:



Making a second batch:


The final product:



I put them each in a plastic bag, had my student teacher attach the poem (see Jenn's blog), and add the food coloring.  This activity was a great success.  The students LOVED watching their play dough change colors. 

  What is great about this year is that the calendar allowed  for us to have a good four days to learn routines, procedures, and get to know each other.  I took every opportunity I could to do just that. 

In lieu of a sticker chart for each student, I decided to try using “Warm and Fuzzies or craft pom poms as incentives this year.  I found this idea from Mrs. Dillard’s blog  .  The students seem to be enjoying earning them.   I took some time to investigate how to store them and eventually came up with an idea that continued with my frog theme. 

  On the first day, the students came to their seats and found a full size picture of a frog, which I asked them to color neatly.  We then cut the frogs out and glued them to folded cardstock.  This made them look like a giant frog greeting card.  I had one of the lovely ladies in our building laminate each of the student'sa frogs.  Once the tedious task of cutting them all out was complete, my student teacher stapled a plastic bag inside of each frog.  The plastic bag is used to hold all collect warm and fuzzies.  Lastly, we used a little bit of Velcro to attach each frog to the back of the students’ chairs.  ** I love VELCRO! If you are a Velcro representative  and reading this, please feel free to send me Velcro anytime you’d like! J **


Take a peek:









On the second day of school I shared “Have You Filled A Bucket Today? with my class.  Click HERE   to find out more information about bucket filling.    After reading the book we studied the bucket filler pledge, generated a list of examples of bucket filling and bucket dipping, and then colored our own little bucket pictures.  I then placed the students’ bucket pictures on the envelopes that I had stapled to the bulletin board.  Here is a shot of our finished bulletin board:




For this week, my student teacher and I worked on filling out a bucket filler slip for each student in our class.  Today, I had the children get their slips out of their “buckets and bring them to our morning meeting carpet.  I asked if there were any volunteers who would like to read (or have me read) their bucket slip.  I suddenly had 18 hands in the air.  They were so proud to hear the nice comments we wrote about them.  Next week, I am going to work with them on filling out slips for their friends. 

  In addition to having bucket filler slips in our room, I created a baggie for the line leader to carry to specials with the class.  Taped to the bag is a brief description of what the slips are used for.  I have provided this description below:
Bucket Explanation Specials


Lastly, I have added two photos of the classroom that I forgot to snap earlier.  The first is of the math tubs that I made.  The flies on the tub are to show the differences in the difficulty levels of each of the activities within the bins.   






The second photo is the container that I created to house my F.R.O.G. binders.  Instead of buying crates (I tried but couldn’t find any green or blue ones) I used butcher paper and heavy duty packing tape to wrap a strong cardboard box.  It works perfectly to hold the students’ binders.  After they check their binder for notes, the simply place it upright in the box.   



That’s it for now.  I will try to post some pictures of some of the icebreaker activities that we did this week, including name/letter graphs, age graphs, and family tree photos made with messy green handprints! 



Happy teaching!!

Mindy Wolf

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