First Day

We had a great first day today. This is going to be an amazing year! I feel so excited.

We have 26 students. One girl apparently moved over the summer. Many of our students have been at Third Street since kindergarten, but we are welcoming a few new students, too. We have one special needs student and this student has a couple excellent helpers. They will be great additions to our class, too.

We spent the first part of the morning filling out some interest inventories and pretests that will help me know the students and their abilities better. This also gave me time to go over the truly endless amount of first day paperwork and to chat with parents. We then went on to discussing the rules and policies. It’s always hard for teachers to teach so many procedures and harder still for students to learn them, but that’s what the first week is mostly about. I do think that this will take less time this year than it has in many previous years.

After recess, students interviewed each other and started writing their first composition, a short “letter of introduction” paragraph. After lunch, we listened to the first chapter of Island of the Blue Dolphins and discussed it. We also started in the math book with our first topic on numeration. We discussed the history of the place value system and how it works with numbers up to 999,999.

We made good speed with this, so the students had a whole hour (!) to get started on the homework.

Homework: (1) Finish the final draft of the “Introduce” paragraph. (2) Do the chapter 1 study sheet for Island. (3) Do the short and long vowels worksheet. (4) Do pages 5-7 in the math book. Put answer on the answer sheet provided. Do “Changing Places” on the back of the answer sheet. (5) Do the Adding and Subtracting without Regrouping worksheet.

Please remember that we will be having our back to school evening next Tuesday, August 20, from 5:00 to 6:00.