5 for Friday and My First Week!

Oh my goodness! I can not express how tired I am! Who I am kidding...I am sure you all know how I am feeling! After the first week of school I am sure we all feel the same way...EXHAUSTED!!  I am running on coffee and redbull! However It was an amazing week! I am so happy to be back in the classroom! My students are great and so is my first grade team! I could not have asked for a better first week!

So I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her 5 for Friday! This is the first time I have had all week to really sit down and actually blog or look at blogs while I relax!

I started off my week with Chester the Raccoon in the Kissing Hand and then moved on to Chester and the Big Bad Bully. After that we read The Juice Box Bully! My students were great during all three books. They all discussed it after. We talked about setting, characters, the problem and the solution. I was impressed that many of them already knew what all of those meant. We did this follow up activity for The Juice Box Bully! My boyfriend said they were Juice Boxes on Steroids! Hahah!There is a copy of this in my store for free. I posted these pictures on my instagram and I had some teachers ask about it. So I stuck it up in my store really fast. 

Juice Box on Steroids!

On Wednesday I introduced Syllables. For some it was a review because they remembered it from Kinder, for others, they were learning this as new. My students did a great job with the interactive notebook. I was kind of nervous but they were on task the whole time. I showed them how to do and reviewed it all with them and then they went to work. While I called on students to come back to my table to read sightwords for me and do the CORE Phonics test with me. As the week went on we also did a syllable Scoot and they did a great job at that too! Have I mentioned that I am so excited about this class..they seem very smart! 

Today...I introduced a couple of my centers. Below is something that is at my writing center. This is my sentence sorts or sentence scrambles. Students sort cards according to the picture. They then take the cards with the same pictures, read the words and sort them to make a sentence that makes sense. This took a little explaining to each group but I feel like after a couple of times they will understand. Once they sort it, they write the sentence and draw a picture to go with it. This is also in my store.

Sentence Sorts 

This is another center I created for my students and introduced this week. This is for beginning sounds. Students look at the picture on the card then decide which sound they hear. Then they clip the clip on that letter. When they are all done, they flip over the card and check to see if they were right. (I draw a little dot on the correct spot they should have the clip) This way it is a self assessing center! 

Clip Card Center

I said this was a very busy week! Not only was it busy at school but it was also busy AFTER school. I had open house on Thursday night and Wednesday night I went to see Brad Paisley with my boyfriend. Brad is one of my favorite country singers (Behind my boyfriend of course! ;) If you have never seen him and you enjoy country...I encourage you to go. He puts on a great show! 

I hope everyone is having a great first couple weeks of school! And I hope your students are as amazing as mine are!