Five for Friday....the First Week of School

Oh My Goodness....There is no tired like the first week of school teacher tired.  I can't remember when I have started off the year this tired.  Either my age is catching up with me or I had so many ideas I wanted to implement after the amazing conferences I attended this summer that I just couldn't do it all.  I tried...but I couldn't do it ALL.

So I am linking up up today with Doodle Bug Teaching to show a few little snapshots of what I did do and how my first week back went GREAT (despite not doing EVERYTHING).

First up...Back to School Night, which technically was last week.  I was not finished with my room, but it was done enough that my parents knew I was working on it.  I had these cute treats for my kiddos and ice cold water for my parents (note to self...there might be more than one parent with their student, so bring more water).  Thanks to Ashley Schroeder from Schroeder's Shenanigans in 2nd for the cute tags and idea!

On the first day we tried to open with major excitement by doing some minute to win it and get to know you games.  We timed to see if we could get an Oreo cookie into our mouth in just a minute (sorry no pictures) and we played Stand Up for Friendship (a freebie in my store).  Just ask general questions, like who has a brother?  And then they Stand Up.  Give your students a chance to see who has interests similar to theirs and maybe talk about it a bit.

Pete the Cat helped us take a tour of the school as we looked for his shoes.  Each of our specials, our lunch lady, principal, secretaries, and nurse decorated a shoe.  We collected them as we went along.  Later we will use them again when we write about our school community.

We ended the day making friendship salad.  I like to use different ingredients to describe the behaviors I want my students to exibit.  Then when it came to our banana they all yelled NO!!  Why no banana?  It was a rotten one of course!  This gave us a chance to talk about those rotten banana behaviors we don't want in our class.

We revisited this discussion later in the week, when we made our own little recipe books and chiefs.  The books came from my unit...but the chiefs belong to Miss Kindergarten.  Hers are so so cute!!  Don't you just love them??

Home to collapse and rest up.   It is going to be a GREAT year!