Peace, Love, Kindergarten

There are a million and one things happening in our class right now! It is so exciting! I decided to split up some of the posts, primarily because I only have pictures at the moment for a few different things we're working on... (who wants to read a picture-less blog??)

First of all, I am in.serious.love. with this activity we did to round off our discussion on rules. I'm a little bit of an out of the box thinker when it comes to basically everything. Thankfully, my kiddos seem to be understanding my never quite direct approach to topics!! When I hear "rules" I immediately think of "peace" (out of the box I tell ya) So instead of preaching rules over and over we discussed, shared, and read stories about peace, peacefulness, what peace means to us, and how we can spread peace.

Here's a precious list we came up with on what peace is to us...

I wrote the "watching football in the fall" one...counting down the days for Texas Tech's first game this weekend! (Parent's don't worry I will won't try to brainwash your child into becoming a huge Red Raider fan!)

When the hand picture was complete, someone asked why their names weren't on it and another students said "It doesn't matter, we're all the same" ...BINGO! Mission accomplished! (Have I mentioned how much I love this job??)

Have a *PEACEFUL* evening!

We're off to great places!

We dove right into our daily routine and I've held nothing back! Everyone is keeping up and having fun (it seems they are anyway!)

We have been introduced to "word work". This is part of our morning routine. We can choose from lots of different options which makes working on words extra fun! Right now we're working on words we find around the room but soon we will have a "ring of words" which I will explain in more depth very soon (my absolute favorite and most beneficial part of our day).

Today we got our book boxes. We are learning how to pick "good fit" books to keep in our boxes while we read. This week we are working on reading to ourself but soon we will also be reading with a buddy and listening to reading (on computers and books on cd/tape). We will keep all our "good fit" books in our baskets but right now we have books with simple text and other fun books we've picked.

In math, we've done some graphing and started math stations. We are free exploring with different manipulatives. I am amazed at how creative everyone is being and how great everyone is planning and working together. I quote: "Let's do this as a team, ok?" ....music to a teacher's ears!

We also started calendar. For the first few weeks I will be helping but soon, the leader and tail leader will be in complete control. It's actually quite amazing to watch once we've gotten in some practice. What can be better than students teaching students??

Yesterday we came up with a set of class rules together. I think the most important one is "treating others as you want to be treated".

I don't want to jinx anthing but my class this year is sooo quiet!! I can't even believe how everyone has adjusted so quickly. I am so lucky to have an entire class of students ready to learn. We are off to an incredible start!