Calendar

The children lead the class in the calendar activities. We do all of the work on the Smartboard. The students are very good at manipulating the pages. If children  have trouble moving things they use a finger that has been cut off of a glove and this makes it easier to move the images. We work on the month, date, day and season. We also work on addition and subtraction using the current date. The children also learn a lot about place value during our number work. The children are getting really good at finding random numbers on the 100 chart by finding the number in the ones column and moving down to find the correct numeral in the tens column. We sing many songs to go along with the calendar too. I use a calendar from a great site I have found called http://www.jmeacham.com/

Morning Message

After the children answer the question of the day they move to the group area of the room and read the morning message. I write about 3 sentences explaining what will happen that day in school. The children are really getting good at reading some of the words and working together to figure out what the message says. There is always a question at the end of the message that they have to answer. After calendar and phonemic awareness work we read the message as a class and circle words we know. We then answer the question. The children who answered correctly get to kiss their brain and the children who did not answer correctly get to do the firecracker cheer because they learned something so early in the day!

I am going to start my class blog at the beginning of the day and each day add another part of the day. This way you can experience how our classroom works and what the children do throughout the day.
When the children enter each day they hang up coats and bookbags and get out their folders and Buddy Books. They then answer the question of the day.

Each of the names are on a card with a magnet on the back. The student puts their name under the correct answer and then proceeds to the morning message.