The first week - Mrs. Russell's Room

Hello everyone! 🙂

I’m excited to begin a new year of teaching…my sixth in first grade! 🙂

I love the back to school season! Everything is so clean and fresh! 🙂

I get to meet all the kids and feel all their wonderful 5 & 6 year old energy and it is the perfect cure for summer blues! There’s nothing like the joy of the students to remind me that I really do live for these nine months I have with them…and it’s wonderful that I get one more opportunity to love on a whole new bunch of wee folk! 🙂

Click HERE to visit DeeDee’s Blog!

On Friday, we had Meet the Teacher. I got a chance to take a selfie with each one of my precious littles! 🙂 Here’s a quick video of the cute that is a part of my classroom this year! 😉

I got a lovely package from one of my new students after Meet the Teacher!
She gave me a shoe box with three envelopes. Each one was to be opened on a different day over the weekend before school started.
Friday’s gift was a chocolate bar.
Saturday’s gift was a Starbucks card.
Sunday’s gift was this poem!
I have to admit getting a bit misty after reading it! It’s on my fridge as we speak! 🙂
Here’s me at Sbux picking up my breakfast on the first day of school!

Now to the activity of the week!
This is our first week of school and so we’re going to be easing into everything and having lots of fun together! After the students and I got their supplies all sorted out, I let them color their pirate pictures!

They looked great out in our hallway!
I was super proud of my little pirates!

Download these from a previous back to school post by clicking HERE.

Next up, the getting to know you scavenger’s hunt!

Want these for your class? They are in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store. Click HERE to go to the set!

One of the toughest standards to cover in a primary classroom is getting kids to ask questions.
This type of activity gives kids a framework of topics to discuss, and an illustration to support non or emergent readers. My kids absolutely LOVED it! 🙂
After my modeling, I set them out to partner with one another. They knew that they could only get one person to sign per box and they did a fantastic job! 🙂

We talked about following the rules and had a good bit of fun while we did! 🙂

I love to tie literacy or other content structures to my integration of rules, habits and procedures. I think it makes the learning ‘stick’ much better than just reading a list of things or showing a powerpoint.

Click on the book if you’d like to check it out on Amazon!

Try out Pete the Cat with emergent readers and then do this great cafeteria craft! 🙂

Loved this from Rowdy in Room 300. I use it every year. You can get it by clicking HERE.

I have an original story that I wrote about bus rules and I share that with my kids before we do a super simple craft to write about what we remember.

Bus Procedures Mini-Unit & Craftivity for Firsties & Seconds

You can get this craft HERE.

I love to use Rachelle Smith’s ABC’s for Back to School. I use it every year too! 🙂

I just came across this really fun book this year! 🙂 It is called This is the Way we Go to School. Have you read it yet?

It’s one that talks about the ways that different students all over the world get to school.

It’s a great book to integrate other topics into! 😉

I’m so excited about how it’s been going in the classroom so far, so without further ado…here’s my cover! 😉

I’ve integrated both math and social studies content with quality literature and the students have really responded well to what I’ve been up to in the classroom!

We read two different books this week, and then worked on quite a few different activities that related to the books.

One activity that I really loved what what we did for math with the book, This is the Way We Go to School, we talked about the ways that students around the world get to school. Each student got a ‘person’ and we created a pattern on our door. We looked at different ways to add both the heads and the feet. It was a great way to have them think outside of the box!

$math through literacy$