Categories Literacy, Math

First Week Activities: Schedulin’ Sunday

Happy Schedulin’ Sunday and a brand new school year! I am so excited to kick off a new school year with a new group of mustaches! And we’re excited to share that journey with everyone! Keep reading for lots of first-week activities!

First Week Activities: Lesson Plans

As always, you can download our weekly lesson plans here:

First Week Activities: The First Day Of Kindergarten

As the kids arrive they color! They even color a picture of Mr. Greg!

We start with morning meeting. During this time, I introduce myself and our student teacher will introduce herself. Then we talk about the fun we will have in kindergarten. Our greeting is simply: “My name is…” I also make the kids say my name a billion times that day. Why? So when they get lost and someone asks their teacher’s name they will say: “Mr. Greg!”

Next, we start learning our morning song: A Beautiful Day by Jack Hartman. We will sing this song a few times so they can get familiar with it.

We start our day with The King Of Kindergarten and The Queen Of Kindergarten. I love the connections and comparisons we can make to these stories!

Name Writing

We also write our names on day 1. First, we do a first-day name chart. This makes a great artifact to show growth all year long.

After the name chart, the students get a piece of paper and a pencil and write their name on their own. This simply serves as a tool for me to see where we are with names and gives us a baseline artifact!

Next, we learn how to use crayons. This is our first class anchor chart from one of our research projects. The students share what crayons can do and what they can not do and we create our anchor chart.

Next, I model how to use crayons to color a soccer ball.

Finally, we get to our first day of school hats!

First Week Activities

After the first day, we shift to full days of school! We start settling into our schedule and really hit those procedures and routines hard.

Here’s what we have planned for the first week!

We make school bus cookies!

We introduce new school supplies each day by making anchor charts and practicing using our supplies! These are STUDENT GENERATED and these are the rules of our class. It’s not a “should/should not” chart because that isn’t explicit. These are things we CAN and CAN NOT do in our classroom with our supplies!

In literacy, we will be using read-alouds and our Read It Up! creations to talk about feelings, friendship, and rules and procedures and celebrate being in kindergarten!

We read Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready For Kindergarten!

I choose this book because it’s fun, and lighthearted and the students can really make connections with the characters in the book. As we read, we discuss what is happening.

After reading the story we make a chart that compares how we got ready for school and how the kids in the story got ready!

We also discuss our first-day feelings! And we graph our feelings!

We use the pigeon book to discuss how we felt about coming to school. The Recess Queen is all about being friends!

Math

In math, we will be working on numbers, number recognition, and counting. We start with two very simple math games that also serve as great informal assessments.

But first…we let the kids play with the manipulatives and explore them! This lets them have fun and helps cut down on some of the distractions when we start our lessons!

For numbers, we use number mats and have students point to numbers. We also have students put counters on the numbers to keep it interesting!

For counting, we spend lots of time playing with our manipulatives and counters! Then we practice counting by putting counters on plates!

This week we also start NUMBER BOOTCAMP!

This week we will work on numbers 1-4. For each number, we complete a circle chart by finding each representation of the number. Students then practice writing the number after I explicitly teach the number formation.

For more on Number Bootcamp, visit this post:

Foodie Fun Friday

This week we focus our Foodie Fun Friday on friendship and the type of classroom we want by making Friendship Salad! We read the book, The Boy With The Rainbow Heart and then make Friendship salad!