Today we began the day with a fun magic play-dough activity. The students were given a ball of white play-dough. I then read a poem which explained that the play-dough would magically change into a new color if our year was going to be great. Well, sure enough, all of the students' play-dough changed into a new color. Insert sigh of relief from Mrs. Sterling that her project worked!
We read oodles of books and learned more about one another with some team building activities. One of the books we read was First Grade Jitters where a little boy is very scared to start 1st grade. He has jitters and butterflies in his tummy until he realizes 1st grade will be fun. We read a "Jitter Juice" poem and then made our own Jitter Juice to wash away any jitters or butterflies that were in our tummies! I forgot to grab a photo of the juice, but here is the poem we practiced echo reading. We also practiced counting, graphing and tallies after trying the juice!
In the afternoon it was time for a math game to practice one to one correspondence and basic counting and addition. We played Back to School Roll and Cover. Students were paired up and learned all of the rules and routines that go along with playing games in our classroom including sitting inside of a hula-hoop, keeping the dice from leaving the hoop. In my rookie years of teaching, I had dice flying across the room!
