Second Week Update

Wow, it's only the third week of school and I am already behind in blogging! I promise I'm going to try harder to at least post once a week.

We had a GREAT second week of school, and I am excited to share some of the fun things we did with you!

We just finished up our All About Me unit, where we spent some time learning about each of the members of our class. This is a great unit to start off the year because learning about eachother helps build a classroom community.

We started out the week reading How I Spent My Summer Vacation. After reading, we shared with some friends all the fun things that we did this summer. Each student was given a t-shirt pattern and was asked to draw a picture of something fun they did over the summer and write a sentence about it.  Here you can see our clothesline of shirts hanging in the hallway:

Here's a close-up:

Next, we read Chrysanthemum. We talked a little bit about names and how everyone has a name that is special for them. For homework, the students were asked to talk to their parents about how they got their name and we spent some time sharing with the class. I loved hearing all the reasons why the different names were chosen! After we shared about our names, we worked on making a piece for our class name quilt. I wish I could show you the finished product with all the names together, but you'll have to settle for just my piece.

Another fun activity we did this week to get to know eachother a little better involved reading the book Family and then creating a house with a portrait of each students' family. After drawing the members of our families, we wrote some sentences describing the people who live in our house.  Here is my example:

The kids loved sharing about the different people in their families. We learned that families come in all shapes and sizes!

We finished off the week reading Jessica by Kevin Henkes. In the book, the main character has an imaginary friend named Jessica whom she spends all her time with. That is, until she starts school. When she starts school she makes new friends with a girl in her class named, you guessed it, Jessica! After reading the book, I paired the students up and they worked on completing a Venn Diagram about themselves. Students were challenged to find 3 things they had in common, and 3 things that made each of them special. I was so impressed with the conversations I heard from the pairs trying to learn new things about eachother.  Here are a few of the finished products:

I got this idea from Just Add Clipart. It was definitely a keeper! The kids all realized quickly that it was almost easier to come up with things they had in common than things that were different. We learned a lot about each other and found some common ground with our new friends.

Week 3 is already underway and is off to a great start! Check back in a few days to see what we are working on.