Another great day in Room 240! As some of your kids may have said, it is my birthday today - we had a nice celebration.

To begin the day, we had Independent Reading Time and Morning Meeting again. After that, we had our first birthday celebration of the year - mine! For birthdays, we sing happy birthday to the birthday person while playing fun instruments. Often a child will have a special adult come in to read one of their favorite books to the class to celebrate as well. Snacks are always welcome, of course, but, for obvious reasons, we hold off on them until the end of the day. You're welcome... :-)

we read a book - an old favorite - Brown Bear Brown Bear What do you See? After that, each child got a page that had a space to fill in the blank for their name and a friend's name (____, ____, what do you see? I see ______ looking at me.) I had them each with a different friend so that we can bind the pages for our first class book, and it will flow like the original book. It should be a fun addition to our classroom library.

After Reading, we had our First Writer's Workshop of the year. We follow the Units of Study curriculum, which is very engaging and exciting for all of us. The kids all wrote for about 20 minutes (straight!!) and then had a chance to share their stories at the end of workshop.

After writing, it was off to the lunchroom for lunch, and then out for recess. When we got back up to the room, we had Read Aloud - we read Nate the Great and the Missing Key. Then it was off to the Media Center for class with Mrs. Hennen. The kids also had book check-out today with her - look for their books in their backpacks!

When we got back to our room, we had Math Workshop. Today we worked on number books, which is a simple assessment for me to see the skills that the kids have with numbers. Also during math workshop, we really focused on positive talk during wrk time, and acknowledged the helpful, kind, and just generally nice comments that they all had for each other as they were working.

At the end of the day we had free choice time, in which we practiced kind and helpful comments and behaviors, to reinforce the lesson from math workshop. They all did great -- there are some really, really nice friendships forming already - be sure to ask your child about them!

After we cleaned up from Choice Time, we had the birthday snack - delicious apples (just for reference, the snacks need to be store-bought and individually wrapped. As were eating, we got all of our things, packed up, and headed out.

Welcome to the blog - I will try to update it each day, to give a brief rundown of what we are up to here in school. As a parent myself, I know that the answer to "What did you do in school today?" is very often "Not much." Hopefully this blog will be a bit of a conversation starter.

We had a great first day of first grade to day. We have a great class - they are a really neat bunch of kids. We started off with some independent reading time, and then had Morning Meeting. We did some procedural stuff (lunch count, attendance, etc.), learned some class rules and routines, and then sang a song. After that, we started Reader's Workshop. We read a couple of books - Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes (about a little girl/mouse who is worried about the first day of school. We also read Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse, which is about two mice and has a nice friendship message. After that, the kids wrote what we call a "Reader Response" - they basically wrote/drew about some part of the book.

For our Writing Time today, we worked on a First Grade Time Capsule, which we will be sealing up this week, to be opened on the last day of first grade. We are going to be putting all sorts of things in it, so that we can compare ourselves, and see how far we have come nine months from now.

After that, it was time to get organized for lunch and recess time. We all headed down to the cafeteria for lunch, and then the kids went outside for their recess.

When we got back up to the room, we had a short read aloud time - two books by Robert Munsch: Pigs and David's Father. Then we headed back downstairs to the gym for PE with Mr. Hill and Mr. Peterson.

When we got back up from gym, we had Math Workshop. Today we took a couple of class polls and made class graphs about our families - the number of people in our families and the number of brothers and sisters that we all have.

After math, we took advantage of the nice weather and went out for a little recess. When we got back in, we got ourselves organized for going home - and making sure that everyone knew where they were going, and how to get there.

Then, it was time to head out - to parent pick-ups, to Minneapolis Kids, to Rec Plus, or to the buses.