The first day of school

The first day of school is always so hard for everybody, no matter how often you’ve done it. Children are nervous of course, but so are parents and teachers. Somehow it seems so important that the first day be just right.

Well, our first day went quite well, I think. All 21 of us showed up, and almost everybody right on time. Students completed Interest Inventories which will help me to guide them toward books in Independent Reading which will be just right for them. They also did a pre-test of third grade skills from the Open Court series. I took a little longer than I thought it would, but I was impressed by their seriousness.

We took a tour of the campus so they would know where to play during recess. We also practiced our line order and walking in line.

Returning to our classroom, we partnered up and interviewed our partners. We took the information we gained from the interview and wrote rough drafts. I corrected those and the students did final drafts.

After recess, I did our first portrait of the year. We will study this skill more in depth later, but for today we did a rough sketch of the person we interviewed and used crayons or oil pastels to color it.

I stayed with the students during lunch today so that they could get a feel for the lunchtime routine. This year we have three lunches, and it seemed much calmer and quieter than last year with fewer children eating at the same time.

After lunch, I gave the students who still needed to work on final drafts a little more time while the students who were done got a head start on the math homework. We then discuss the basic rules which apply in any classroom, including, of course, ours. Their wording of the rules was slightly different from mine, but the basic values and ideas were the same.

Tomorrow, we’ll start learning our daily schedule and the “how to” of each activity on the schedule.

Homework:  Homework starts our very easy at first. I like to give students a feeling of success and confidence. We can then decided how to make it more challenging for some students. For tonight,

1. Do the addition facts worksheet.


2. Study the spelling words – no need to write anything.


3. Bring in a photograph or a picture if you don’t have a photograph of you and a friend doing something together. This photo will be returned when the friendship unit is over. It is for our Concept/Question board.