First Week Ideas...Part 2!

Well, I'm two days into the school year, and boy has it been busy!  We have continued doing team-building activities to get to know each other as a community and are working on building our anchor charts to establish expectations and procedures in the classroom.  

Some of the anchor charts we created together were:

• Real Reading Vs. Fake Reading:  We talked with the students about what both real reading and fake reading looked like and created a T-chart to show their thoughts.

• Independent Reading:  After establishing the differences between real reading and fake reading, we then came to consensus on what Independent Reading time should look and sound like.   

• Writer's Workshop:  As with Independent Reading, we discussed and recorded on chart paper what our Writer's Workshop time should look and sound like.

• Lunch and Recess:  As I mentioned in another post, we create the expectations of both recess and lunch with the students.  This engages them more in the things we discuss, giving them more ownership over what is expected of them!

• Classroom Expectation:  Again, I mentioned this in another post, but the students help establish the expectations of the classroom, including what we expect of each other, which we call our Classroom Constitution.   The only prompt we give the students is to focus on what they should do, versus what they should NOT do!  

These are the anchor charts we've created so far.  We pretty much create one for every part of our day to ensure the students have a clearer understanding of what to expect of each other!  These anchor charts hang all around our room!

One other community building activity we did this week was create a classroom puzzle.  Our wonderful student teacher cut a piece of tag board into 54 puzzle pieces.  She put a number on the back of each piece in the order they were on the puzzle.  We then gave each student a piece and had them write their name on it and decorate the piece however they wanted.  We then called the students down, one at a time, starting with number one, and glued our puzzle pieces onto another piece of tag board!  It looked so cool, and the kids have loved looking at it throughout the day!