Friday, September 9, 2016

First Week of School!

Welcome to our classroom blog! My goal is to keep you updated as often as I can about the things that we are doing this year. I hope that it can be a good starting point for you to know and ask your child about the school day. It has been a busy and fun first few days of school! Here are some of the many things that we have been up to this first week:

We have been learning and practicing many important rules, routines and procedures that will help make our classroom a fun and safe learning environment.

Here are some things that we have been working on that you can ask your child about:   
  • Class/Yes
  • Hands and Eyes
    Blow and Release 
  • Games: Coconut, "Around the Room" and Quiet as a Mouse
  • We learned sign language for:
    listen
    stop
    teacher
    sit down
  • See if your child can remember the signs!
  • We read a great book called Enemy Pie.  Ask your child what the "secret" to enemy pie is!
  • Hopes and Dreams - We read the story Amazing Grace and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Both were great stories about characters who had dreams! After that students wrote about a hope they have in second grade. Ask your child what he/she wrote about!    

We also did a lesson on "fair."
If your child is still wearing his/her band aid, see if he/she can tell you what fair looks like in our classroom.

Today I asked each student to think of an injury either current or past that they had somewhere on their body. I told them that I was going to give them a band aid for it. Each student came up to me and showed me his/her injury. I put all of the band aids on each student on the same spot - on their arm.  After everyone had a band aid (and much confusion on their part), we talked about what had just happened.

I asked them if everyone got a band aid. Yes. So was that fair? Yes. Did where I put the band aid on help everyone? No. Was that fair? No. We talked about how in our classroom different kids are going to need different things throughout the year. Some kids might need more help in reading or in math. Some kids might need a different area to work in, some kids might not. I told them that as their teacher I want to do what is "fair" so that all students can learn the best that they can. That might look different sometimes. Just because I do one thing for one student and not another does not mean that I like some students better than others.  t means that I am doing what is best for that student. So it's ok if things look different in the classroom for different students. 
Ask them about the visual/picture we used with the three boys looking over the fence. It helped to illustrate this point. 

"Fair is not everybody getting what the same thing. Fair is everybody getting what they need." 

Everyone worked hard this week!  Have a great weekend! Next week will be another great week! 


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