Categories Classroom Management, Literacy, Math

SCHEDULIN SUNDAY: THE FIRST DAY AND FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL

Well, here we go. The 2023-2024 school year is here, and I’m excited for a new school year, a new school, and new students! If you’re new here, welcome to Schedulin’ Sunday. Each Sunday, I share my lesson plans and everything we will do for the week. It’s also when I prep all of my materials for the week! This means less stress all week since everything is ready to go! For more information on Schedulin’ Sunday, check out the post at the end.

Lesson Plans

As always, you can download our weekly lesson plans by clicking on the image!

You can get our lesson plan templates here:

The First Day Of School

The first day of school is a lot. It’s stressful, scary, and overwhelming. But remember to slow down, relax and have fun! Our first day of school kicks off with a morning meeting. We focus on procedures: sitting on the carpet, safe hands, etc. I introduce myself, and we talk about our class. For our greeting, we go around the circle and say our names. Then we read our message.

After the morning meeting, we will start learning our new songs. We start with A Beautiful Day by Jack Hartman. And then we do Alien Alphabet by Intelli-tunes.

Next, we have our first read-aloud. And again, we’re focused on procedures and routines. We’re learning how to be good listeners and share out. Our first read-aloud is The King Of Kindergarten. After reading the story, we do our first graphic organizer. We compare our day to King’s day.

Then we write our names. Each child comes to the chart paper and writes their name. Every child does it. And we cheer for each child and their name writing.

Then the kids get a blank piece of paper and practice writing their names. I keep this as a baseline artifact.

Now we have brunch, so we’re going to learn how to walk in the hallway and learn cafeteria procedures.

Next, we learn how to use crayons. We use our School Supply Research Project and introduce supplies as we need to use them. The students generate the rules for the supplies. These are all student-generated and give students ownership of the class. As students share their ideas, I record them.

The kids then practice coloring by coloring a soccer ball. I like the soccer ball because it has lots of sections for the kids to color.

Grab your FREE soccer ball page below!

Finally, we end our first day with our first day hats and pictures. I take pictures of the kids to use in the classroom (cubbies, work displays, etc).

And this year, we’re adding a new tradition to our first day of school. We’re making name bracelets. We are using pipe cleaners, letter beads, and some fun shape beads. I will put the correct letters for each child in a Ziploc bag with a name card. They will put the letter beads on to spell their name and then add some fun beads to make a bracelet!

The First Week Of School

The first week of school is all about routines and procedures. All day. Everyday. All the routines and procedures.

Reading

This week we read several stories to help us talk about the first days of school, feelings, and books.

We read The King Of Kindergarten and The Queen Of Kindergarten. We compare our days to the story, we talk about what makes us excited about school and our feelings about school.

We also read Wild About Books (as part of our required curriculum) and we introduce our notice and wonder chart.

We read Brown Bear, Brown Bear and graph our favorite colors. We also use our coloring skills to color the animals.

Math

Our big focus of math this week is just letting the kids explore and play with manipulatives. Each day we play with another manipulative for 10-15 minutes. This helps the rest of the year because the kids will be a little less tempted to play with the manipulatives during our math lessons.

We will do some simple games so I can observe our number recognition and counting skills.

I print out these number mats and make sure the kids sitting next to each other don’t have the same mats! I say a number and the kids point to the number. Super easy.

To practice counting, we use manipulatives and paper plates. I say a number and I see if the kids can put the correct number of counters on their plates.

Number Bootcamp

We start Number Bootcamp this week and work on numbers 1 and 2. Each day we do a number. We work on number recognition, counting with one-to-one correspondence, and learning math vocabulary.

School Supply Research Project

We will continue using our School Supply Research Project to learn about supplies. This is organic so we introduce a supply as we need it. This week is pencils, scissors, and glue sponges.

We also do our first school supply puzzle to work on coloring, cutting, gluing, and numbers.

Here’s a video of us practicing with out glue sponges:

Foodie Fun Friday

Foodie Fun Friday is a classroom tradition where we make a snack each Friday. Click the post below to read all of the details.

This week we actually make two snacks. We make our school bus cookies on Wednesday, which is a half day.

Friday for Foodie Frun Friday, we make our famous Friendship Salad. This snack helps us create the type of classroom community that we want (happiness, kindness, hard work, sharing) and what we don’t want: no rotten bananas.