Why, Hello! Remember Me?

What a busy couple of weeks! Between getting accustomed to being back to work and getting my own little ones into a regular routine, I have barely had time to come up for air! I'm sure you can all relate.

I am really enjoying my new class of firsties.  I'll admit, though, that I had forgotten how much modeling and remediation is necessary at the beginning of a new school year. I've been coming home exhausted; in fact, KShaf and I have been in bed by 8:30 the past two nights!

We started our homogenous Language Arts instruction last Monday (after spending the first week of school using Babbling Abby's Fun With Firsties pack...so cute!). We ironed out a lot of the kinks that we encountered last year, including buying these amazing bins to help the children transition from classroom to classroom:

They are a little cumbersome, but I would rather deal with unwieldy bins than listen to the sound of a thousand dropped pencil boxes hitting the linoleum any day!

I have introduced Read to Self, Read to Someone, and Listen to Reading...only two more of the Daily Five to go! My little ones have done an amazing job with each of the Daily Five; they have taken to them like ducks to water!

One of my little guys, reading to himself.

These three munchkins look pretty comfy in my "reading nook," don't they? What you can't see in this picture is that they were all wearing sunglasses with the lenses removed as "reading glasses."

I love that this little cutie is using his "slide" to segment and blend unfamiliar words during Read to Someone.

I had to get crafty with the area that I use for Listen to Reading. There is only room for two adult-sized chair, and the counter is too high to use little chairs. Thankfully, my students don't mind sharing an adult chair with another child!

We did some really fun activities to practice what we know about words with short a. I gave the students letter tiles for the consonants m, s, c, and t (our consonants of the week) and the vowel a, and they had to make as many short a words as they could. Some of them got really creative!

I'm ready for a cup of tea (or glass of wine...I haven't made up my mind yet), but before I go, I have to recommend the book My Great-Aunt Arizona, by Gloria Houston (you've probably heard of it before). Princess A nabbed it from my book closet at school the other day and brought it home, and tonight, we read it before bed. I don't usually get choked up (unless I'm hormonal or getting sick), but this book brought tears to my eyes. It's such an inspiring story about the last impact that teachers have on their students.

Enjoy what's left of your "hump day!"