First Few Days of School! And a Peek at My NEXT Week!

OMG! I keep thinking about posting about what we are doing but I am so crazy busy, I barely have time to even think about it! I am going to **TRY** to link up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for a Peek at my Week before the week starts, but we'll see how that goes :)

I finally have a break today, so I thought I would share with you some of the fun things I am doing with my kinders! I have to say that as a new K teacher this year, I wasn't sure how to start. I have gotten so many fun, engaging activity ideas from fellow bloggers and I will try my very hardest to make sure that they get credit for all their ideas!

I think as everyone knows, the first few days are a blur of routines and procedures, especially in K!
My main routines that I teach the first few days are:
-1, 2, 3 for question, bathroom, drink
-line up in number order (kinders CAN do it, and it makes life so easy!)
-safe body
-transitions

These are just a few highlights from the first few days:

**Buddy Building: Parents always talk to me about how important it is to them that their children make friends, and I wanted each child to go home on the first day and tell their parents they made a friend. So we did buddy building!

 

Literally, the easiest activity ever to set up. I just gave partners a bucket of snap cubes, and gave them a few ideas of things to talk about it. It was perfect! If I saw a group that was struggling a little with their conversation, I just gave them a few ideas!

**First Day of K Frame: I am SO happy how these turned out!

 

**My Name Is....: This was a perfect formative assessment for me! I already had the chart filled out and each child wrote their name. After they wrote it, we did a chant for them. "Hey, hey, what do you say? We're happy _____ is here today! Woo ______!" So silly, and so easy, but they loved it! Even on the first day of school I could keep them interested long enough to do everyone.

**Introducing the Rules: These are rules that my school has decided to use school-wide, but I think they could easily be used in any classroom. I use the tune from Dr. Jean's Rule song and use hand motions to go with each rule. My kiddos SO remember these. It's amazing. They already remind each other with the hand motions! What smarties :) You can get your copy of my rules here :)

**Pete the Cat School Tour: My kids LOVED this! We read Pete the Cat: Rocking in my School Shoes and talked about all the places we could go in our school. Then we had a special message from Pete in the back of the book and went on our school tour. In hindsight, my kiddos weren't quite procedurally ready for this, but in the end, at least they had fun!

After the tour, there is a top secret envelope waiting in the room. Each student gets to color their own school shoes and practice writing their name! We also played disappearing shoes (take one person's shoe in the circle with everyone's eyes closed and then name who they are!). This is great for learning friend's names.

You can get a copy of our Pete the Cat tour and activity here!

**Wemberly Worried craftivity: I got this wonderful idea from Mrs. T's First Grade Class. We read Wemberly Worried and talked about what we were worried about when we got to school. The exciting part was painting! We talked about what a circle looked like, and then painted circles on our papers with watercolors. I thought this was going to be a disaster, but they did a great job!

The next day, I modified the words for my kinders and they dictated to me what they worry about. Some of them were so cute!

**How To Lose All Your Friends and Friendship Salad: I think that reading this book is applicable for any elementary classroom! It is a great way for students to all laugh and gasp together at the way the kiddos act in the story and to truly see what a bad friend is. Then, we made friendship salad! I got this idea from Greg at Smedley's Smorgasboard. It was super fun and the kiddos loved that they got a snack!

Obviously, this is just a smattering of what we did, but we had a lot of fun. We're learning to listen and play together :)

Here is my attempt at visual lesson plans for next week! (Can you tell I like Mrs. Will's products?) I am trying really hard to be consistent and not introduce too much too fast. We have not started literacy stations and will not for at least 2 weeks. Right now, I am teaching the games whole group MULTIPLE times.

So here they are! Making this for myself is so helpful and hopefully it will help you too! I will post pictures of our week HOPEFULLY on Friday!

Have a great week!