Faithfully in First - a first grade blog: September 2014

Johnny Appleseed's birthday!

We had a special guest join us for Chapel - Johnny Appleseed (aka Mr. Perring). What a fun

morning!

Here is Mr. Perring singing the Johnny Appleseed song.

Here they are singing "Happy Birthday"!

Joseph's Coat of many colors...

Here are my little firsties being so eager to answer Mrs. Cave's questions about her lesson on Joseph.

Here they are doing a craft of Joseph's coat! It was so much fun!

STAR students!

Here are the first two STAR students this year!

This one is our "punctual" student! He is always on time and with his watch, he helps me stay on time! Congrats!

Here is our "respectful" student. He is always very respectful to both his fellow classmates and his teachers! Congrats!

I am using "The Daily Five" for learning center choices. Here they are practicing" Read to Self" for the first time. The students go "shopping" each week to choose "good fit" books for their book bins. Then they choose a good reading spot and practice reading. In the beginning, we just read for a for a few minutes. As the year progresses, time is added and we work on building reading "stamina". They didn't want to quit when I was ready for them to on the first day! That was exciting!

Brain breaks!

I am a huge fan and student of whole brain learning. I use this in my classroom daily and I'm constantly trying to become better at incorporating it into everything I teach. One of the parts of whole brain teaching is a scoreboard. The class as a whole is rewarded with tally marks under the smiley face or the frowny face during the day and then rewarded based on the score. If there are more smiles than frowns by lunch, the students are rewarded some brain breaks after recess. Then we wipe the slate clean and start all over for the second half of the day. At the end of the day, if there are more smiles than frowns, they get to choose a piece of candy from the candy box as they leave. Here are the kids enjoying a brain break after recess. As you can see, some of them prefer to just color or watch from their seats - and that's okay, too!

Using our new Bibles!!!!!!!

We are all so excited about our new Bibles his year! We've always had the kids bring a Bible but everyone had different ones. They were all wanting us to help them find the story in their Biblles. We just didn't have enough time to help that many kids every day, SO, we decided to ask them all to get the same Bible this year so that we could all read the stories together! I don't know who was more excited - the kids or the teachers!? I also purchased the entire Beginner's Bible app this summer. It has the exact pictures and words as our stories that we are doing in chapel. If you think we were excited about the Bibles, you should have seen how excited we were once we realized this! I've been making each story ino a flip chart that we can use on our Promehean boards. Here is an example of Mrs. Cave teaching about Adam and Eve and how the kids were able to see the story in their Bibles AND on the board!

Here is Mrs. Cave pulling "Adam" out of the dirt. Thank you, Mrs. Beller for making the teachers our own Adams and Eves!

Here is Mrs. Cave showing a model of a skeleton and showing where the rib bones are. She covered the face because Mrs. Kelsey thought it might scare some of the kids.

Mrs. Cave is a great teacher and presented an awesome chapel lesson! I'm so thankful that we get to have chapel together with the kindergarten classes. Most of all, I'm thankful that we can tell the kids about God every day at OCA!