Week 6

This week of teaching was quite the whirlwind! Mondays are always very fast-paced and crazy. Mainly this is because I've been away from the classroom for four days and my teacher and I haven't had time to catch up on what's going on for the week yet. We have many specials on Mondays and Tuesdays, so it makes for a busy three days that I'm in the classroom! I'm finding that I should maybe write about what we did during the day at the end of every school day-because by the time it gets to the end of the week I almost can't remember what we did!

Our theme for the week was 'growing up.' This made for many fun discussions and books that dealt with getting older. We read a book on how lions grow up and the students were just amazed that by the time a lion is 6 years old it is considered an adult and goes out on its own. Since we have many 6 year olds in our class, it really hit home for them! We talked about the stages of growing up, how an adult is considered 20 and older and one of the boys stated, "ya, and then you get to be 90 and die!" bahaha...

We continued with our reading groups, as usual. We are learning more about nonfiction books and what makes a book nonfiction. Real pictures is a big indicator for them that the book will be nonfiction. I read a book with my high group of readers called, "The Giant and the Frippit." Obviously this was a fiction book, however the Frippit was this funny rabbit looking thing and one of my boys INSISTED that it was nonfiction because he was SURE that he had seen a frippit before in the woods. This kid would not take no for an answer! I think we have some more work to do.... :)

For math we did a lot of station teaching this week. We did several activities to get the kids working on their forward and backward number sequencing, as well as working on the terms 'what comes before' and 'what comes after.' We've been working a lot with the numbers 10-20 because the teens are sometimes the most difficult for the students to grasp. First grade also works on counting by 2's, 5's, and 10's. We tried a game to help them to learn to count by 5's, but it was a disaster. They really struggle with the number 15 because it's different than everything else and more abstract.

The other big event for this week was our field trip to the fire station. We walked the little more than 6 blocks to the station, which was quite the trek for some of the students. They whined and whined the whole way there saying things like, "I'm gonna diiiiieee," and "Why can't we take the bus?" In their defense it was pretty hot outside-I felt like complaining a little bit too, but I AM the grown up now ;) The fire station was so much fun for the students. We watched this ancient video on fire safety and then got to look inside the fire truck. The kiddos loved it. One of the tools that the fireman pulled out what a long spear looking object with a blunt end and a sharp end. It is used for opening doors during a fire. The fireman asked what that could be used for and one of my little ones yelled out "To kill zombies!!" Ohh dear...what is the world coming to! haha, it was pretty entertaining. All of the students LOVED to meet the fireman and thought they were so cool. We even got some pictures of them! I will have to post them once I figure out if I am allowed to do so...I wouldn't want to post them when if I shouldn't, but I think it would be fun to put a group picture of my class on here :)

That was our week in a nutshell!

Hope you had a great week and have a wonderful weekend!

God Bless,

Mrs. Aman