My First Day

Well, I survived (at least long enough to post this haha!). Note to self: never, ever wear heels on the first day of school again. You haven't stood up all day long for 3 months. You.Will.Regret.It!

Ahem. (Yes I really did wear heels and got two big ole pinkie toe blisters for my troubles!)

What a great first day! It was raining this morning and I was worried that we would end up with indoor recess. My ELMO is being wacky and keeps shutting off by itself so we wouldn't be able to watch a movie and I gave all of my recess games to my 2nd graders at the end of last year because we rarely used them anyway.  Thankfully we were only indoors before school and it cleared up enough to be outdoors for recess and lunch. Whew! (There is nothing worse than indoor recess on the first day of school!)

I ended up with 20 hot bodies in my room. (Originally I had 28 on my roster.) We have a fairly transient population so this isn't that surprising--families move late and don't notify the schools until they enroll in the new one and that sort of thing. Oddly enough I ended up with 10 4th graders and 10 5th graders. Split right down the middle.  My 5th grade colleagues had 30 on their rosters but ended up at 27 each I believe. 4th grade, however, is fairly busting at the seams with 32 and 31 hot bodies in their rooms today. Crazy. (Not as crazy as the 39 and 40 kids in the 5th grades last year!)

Unless all of the "missing" kids show up tomorrow, what will likely happen is they will steal a few 4th graders from the other two classes and add them to my room. So I'll still be a split but I'll be high on 4th graders. I realized when I had my 4/5 split my first year of teaching, I was high on 4th graders then too! Funny how that works out.

We had a super hard start to the day by going to Art! We of course went through rules, routines and procedures throughout the day. We did the "A Summer to Tweet About" activity and our Writing Goals activity which was super fun and so cute! Some of their little birds are hilarious. One of the boys put red "veins" in the eyes of his bird. I said "oh that's what I look like when I wake up!" and the students all laughed. So fun.

Sadly my ELMO was being a pain so we didn't get to do some of the stuff I would have liked to do but we started our Calendar board routine and I'm really excited about implementing it in my class this year. It's amazing how SHY the students were today in terms of volunteering answers. I understand because it's only the first day of school and they are trying to "feel me out" as it were, but I am excited about this year. I have no idea how many students I will gain from the other classes but I am thanking my stars that I don't have to lose any of my babies that I already have.