Five for Saturday { September }

I know it is Saturday…but this is my Five for Friday. I’m still lingering on yesterday. Short weeks for some reason feel longer. I can’t figure it out. Is it because we are still supposed to cram everything we do in five days into four? Is it because we had a meeting everyday? Maybe it was because I stayed late every day this week?

Well this was my Monday:

Awww relaxing, beautiful, peaceful, sunshine, beach.

Tuesday we started word work for the very first time! My kids were pumped to start working with the “fun” materials. I started them out at their tables with wikki sticks, magnetic letters, stamps, and markers. They loved writing their spelling words, sight words, and words from our word wall. They are so loud though!!! We are working on quiet voices. They are just excited about the new materials. I was going to introduce writing on whiteboards and lego letters next week. I may have to hold off until they can control their volume more though.

 

I got a bunch of new books from my reading coach! I wish they were all mine…but they are for our first grade team. We have ten classes so I split them among the team. There were ten read aloud sets that were the same and then various level of books for the students. I tried to split these evenly by level and genre. So one person didn’t end up with five math books that were all easy reads. They should get a good mix of great literature, excellent read alouds, cool non-fiction reads, and little readers for their first graders. Each teacher got twenty new books for their library. I love getting new books to add to my library!

I have a super sweet volunteer this year who was a teacher at my school. She stopped teaching when she had her second child and now she is a photographer. She is such a help in the classroom! She cut out all this lamination and took beautiful pictures of my kids! She had all the pictures printed out for me professionally and wrapped them up like a little present. So thoughtful! She also wrote the nicest note saying how great I was with the kids and she thought I was the perfect teacher for her daughter. Melt my heart! This made my day! Sweet and encouraging notes help me realize why teaching is my passion.

We read “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” this week. This book is all kinds of funny! My students’ love how expressive and persistent the pigeon is in the book.  We used this book to write captions this week. This is my copy…without a caption. I wish I would had mine done or taken a snap shot of their finished products. They wrote:  

Don’t let the pigeon cook!

Don’t let the pigeon go to the farm!

Don’t let the pigeon go to school!

Don’t let the pigeon teach your class!

Don’t let the pigeon babysit!

They did such a good job but Friday afternoon is super busy and I forgot to snap any pictures. I'll have to take some pictures on Monday.

Well friends I hope you enjoy your weekend! I’m going to watch some college football and do chores around the house!