Welcome to Mrs. Rowe's First Week

Week one is over!  I found myself feeling so overwhelmed this week with everything.  Today was the first day I left work well before 6pm.  But, at the end of my first week as a full time teacher, I can truly say that I still love my job.

I have a lot of kiddos to teach this year (27 as of now) and all have their very own needs from academics to behaviors. At the end of this week, I already feel like I know them so well and I haven't even completed or graded one start of the year assessment yet!  My how much I will learn in the next few weeks about them.

I spent the early part of the week really getting to know the kids, sharing with them, and planning for how our classroom will operate this year together.  Check out some pictures of our work so far.

Our getting to know you activity along with the book Mrs. Spitzer's Garden by Edith Pattou (see an earlier post about this here).

Our classroom Constitution.  This started our first Social Studies unit about our U.S. Government and gave us a chance to decide what was important to us as a class for how we act and treat one another this school year.

After really starting to establish the expectations this week, I dove right into teaching by Wednesday.  We talked about picking a just right book using the "I Pick" strategy and the five finger rule.  I would share a picture, but my drawings were not so great (the kids decided that the five finger rule should be called the five leaf rule in our classroom instead as my drawn hand looks more like a leaf).  We talked about our thinking while we read and after practicing and marking our thinking in our books with post it notes, here is what we came up with to chart:

We talked about how to "Buzz" with a partner about the book we are reading.  This year, this is what our "Buddy Reading" is going to look like.  Talking about and having a conversation about what we have read with a partner/friend.  The kids did a great job at coming up with ideas of what this should look like and sound like:
     - Ask your partner: What is happening in your book? (Giving a summary so far)
     - Sit knee to knee
     - Talk about your opinions of the book and why
     - Talk about predictions
     - Describe your own visualizing of the book (the movie in your head)
     - Sharing the questions you had while reading
We talked about when it is okay to abandon a book and reasons we have all abandoned books in the past.  We spent so much time re-learning how to independently read and "buddy" read this week.  By today, they all wanted to know when we could have our reading workshop again!

In writing, I decided that I want the kids to do a lot of writing with technology.  The type of writing that they will do in ten plus years when they are in my shoes won't be the type of writing we do today or did yesterday.  We don't write handwritten notes anymore.  Rather, we type up an email and send it out immediately.  It occurred to me that kids don't understand that this is still letter writing and the concept of "text" language isn't always appropriate.  I decided to focus our early writing this year on the concept of friendly email format.  Check out what the kids and I came up with after taking a peak at some real examples:

I am so excited to see what week 2 brings and cannot wait to share.  I hope you enjoyed a peak into what we spent our first week doing in Mrs. Rowe's 5th Grade Classroom!