Fun Days in First Grade

Welcome First Grade families! We are SO excited to have you all join us on this first grade journey!!! Our friends have been hard at work this week learning a lot of new rules and procedures to help us create a successful year in First Grade!!! Our class has spent a lot of time this week learning how to be STAR classroom and school citizens. As you have seen, we are now a PBIS school, which means we have implemented a school wide behavior system that focuses on our students POSITIVE behavior. We are Forest View Stars and work hard every day to be Safe, Trustworthy, Accountable and Respectful.

We have taken the opportunity this week to spend time getting to know one another, build relationships within our classroom (and first grade team). Our class was able to play a fun game of Tic-Tac-Toe a couple of times with Mrs. Powell's class this week. We learned that this is a terrific game of strategy and that we could practice being STAR students by playing safely and respectfully. We LOVED cheering our teammates on! Our classes have the opportunity throughout the year to work together on various projects and learning experiences so we thoroughly enjoy getting to know them as much as we can. In addition to our games of Tic-Tac-Toe, we also played a fun game of Find A Friend where we had to interact with and find friends that could fit the description of specific things (i.e. friends who can walk backwards, friends who can write their last name, friends who like the same color as them, etc.). You can see the fun we have been having in the pictures below.

This week was full of opportunities for our class to help discuss and develop our own set of rules. We spent time each day learning how to be star students in throughout the school and specifically in the classroom. Together we came up with a classroom agreement. Our students now have a set of rules to follow that they helped come up with so that all students are Safe, Trustworthy, Accountable and Respectful. After developing the rules together, our friends all signed our agreement, making a pact to follow our agreement everyday!

Our new first grade experiences this week included much more than rules and routines as well. Every day this week we learned about all of the fun we will have in learning new and increasingly complex skills this year. We have already found out that we will become authors this year and are super excited to explore this idea more. In addition to many writing opportunities throughout the week, on Friday our class created books about their First Week of First Grade. Everyone was able to choose a comfortable place in our room that they could focus and work independently, which is something we have been working hard at every day. Independent workers are respectful of their friends, work on their own and work the whole time. Check our our independent writing time below!!

We have been spending time each day reading The Energy Bus for Kids by James Gordon, learning how to Persevere, Stay Positive and Overcome Challenges. Our friends have learned 5 valuable lessons from our story:

1. Create a Positive Vision

2. Fuel Your Ride with Positive Energy

3. No Bullies Allowed

4. Love Your Passengers

5. Enjoy the Ride

If our friends choose to maintain a positive vision and fuel up with positive energy, they can drive their own bus and help change the world. We can all share our newly learned Energy Bus rules and through our words and actions we can teach others what we have learned. You can see the story below.

In addition to reading various stories and having discussions about working hard, we had an opportunity to practice Persevering first hand. Our friends are each a part of a TEAM this year and each team had the opportunity to work together, discuss strategy and try to build a tower out of tape, string and noodles that would hold up a marshmallow on top. It was so fun getting to watch each team learn about their teammates and discuss their ideas, develop a plan, implement their plans and then adjust when their plans did not work the way they thought they would. We found out that it was very difficult but WE KEPT TRYING!!!!

Team 1 was SO close to getting their tower to stand!! They taped their initial base of their tower to the table and then slowly built it up from there. With a few more noodles supporting the base I think they would have had it!!

Team 5 had a lot of ideas to talk about. Some friends though leaving the noodles long was best while others though cutting them shorter would work better. There was a lot of great discussion happening here!

We are thinking!! We have a marshmallow attached to some noodles however the marshmallow is only about 1/2 inch off of the table. Our friends in Team 4 had to keep problem solving to make it taller. Joseph is working hard to attach long noodles together.

Team 6 was working hard discussing their ideas and developing a plan!

I would like to take a minute to say THANK YOU to all of your support and participation in your child's learning experience this year! We have been blessed with a lot of school supplies which will help all of our students make meaningful connections throughout the year. As a reminder, please check your child's take home folder every day! There are papers sent home throughout the week that sometimes need to be sent back to school. Also, please use the pouch inside to put notes for me or money for lunch, popcorn, etc.

Additionally, please make sure to check your child's snack calendar and safe food list inside thier daily folder. Remember, we are a peanut/tree nut FREE classroom. You can also visit our snack idea list on our FAQ page here for ideas on healthy snack options. As a reminder, if foods are sent in that are not a healthy option, they will not be served - our goal is to have a break to re-energize and re-fuel. If you are unable to send in snack on your day please let me know ahead of time so that arrangements can be made. We do not have extra snacks in the class so if you are able to send in a little extra something for backup (i.e. a bag of pretzles, apples, cheese sticks, etc.) we would greatly appreciate it!!

We are SO looking forward to all of the amazing learning experiences we are going to share this year. I am extremely excited to begin this learning journey with your child. Please don't hesitate to email or call!

Take a peak below and see some awesome artwork that our talented firsties have made this week. We thought it was a ton of fun getting to create self portraits and make our mark in our hallway. We also had fun being writers again and telling all about first grade. We think First Grade is Fun, Awesome, Cool, and so much more!!!