"My coach said I ran like a girl, and I said if he ran a little faster he could too." - Mia Hamm Manny and Tildyn working on Minute Math which is our warm up for the day. Other than being told I forgot to change out of pajamas this week (I intentionally left those pants on for Back To School Night because I decided to own it.), the page of this book was a favorite first grade moment. This is a great story about a girl who learns there has never been a female president. She decides to run for school office. Her opponent is a boy. It does a great job explaining electoral votes. She wins office and we all cheered and clapped! Then we got to this wordless page and someone said with much glee, "She got married!" So, everyone started cheering and clapping again. I just laughed. Then quickly clarified the inauguration process. :) What a fun job I have! For read aloud, we read about Ruby Bridges. In fiction stories, we also read about an African American girl who wanted to join an all boys baseball team and an African American girl who wasn't accepted at her ballet studio because of how tall she was in comparison to other girls. All stories were great examples of never giving up! I snuck a picture during mindfulness. We come straight from recess to the floor and refocus ourselves. When I asked, "Why do we do mindfulness?" Ter'Rae said, "It keeps us balanced" . Imani said, "To calm our minds and bodies". It has been a great addition to our schedule. Looking forward to seeing how long we can sustain our meditation by the end of the year. We played a fun game in math called "Bugs On A Grid". We talked about columns and rows and how to plot points on a grid. We watched this video, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6vhjpnfd3c&nohtml5=False. Thanks for the GREAT turn out to Back To School Night. Here are some follow-up items: New wish list: www.teacherlists.com/schools/53779-vernon-elementary-school/864784-wish-list/ms-havens-first-grade/wish-list Book Group Opportunity: Are you interested in reading Pushout with me? Here is the link for the book: www.amazon.com/Pushout-Criminalization-Black-Girls-Schools/dp/1620970945/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473643788&sr=8-1&keywords=pushout If you are interested, please fill out this survey: https://goo.gl/forms/F65ihrEe9lsDmBSh2 Feel free to invite others! Just have them fill out the survey, too. Parent Surveys: If you haven't done so, please fill out this parent survey: https://goo.gl/forms/OG5vhur8QrBja9hj1 Homework: Here is the research I referenced at Back To School Night regarding homework: www.edutopia.org/blog/research-trends-is-homework-effective-youki-terada I'm very interested in using this PYP approach to homework (ignore the student agreements and some boxes): Thoughts? Let me know! Finally, a parent offered this article regarding teaching Social Justice in the classroom and it said perfectly why I choose to focus our read aloud books on social justice topics. http://www.raceconscious.org/2016/09/paul-kivels-suggestions-white-racial-justice-parenting/ Everyday this week I will have a substitute in my room for 40 minutes so I can assess kids in reading. I'm so thankful for this time to spend with each individual student. Knowing where each child is at in their reading development is one of the most important pieces of knowledge I can have as a teacher, because I can give each student exactly what they need.
Vernon has been such a supportive community. From administration to parents to the PTA, I've felt the support from the community. It's nice to know you are exactly where you are meant to be. Have a GREAT week! Aimee
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What an amazing start to first grade! Logistics: When I send group emails, I use parentvue. If your email address isn’t correct in our system, then you won’t be getting emails. Please check with the verification papers that went home last week. The attendance secretary will be using those to make changes to your information. She is the only person who has access to make changes. If something comes up you need to have a conversation with me about, please send me an email, text or note to let me know. (Of course, light chit chat is always welcome!) The morning times are hectic and my focus needs to be on my 25 students. (For pick-up in the afternoon, sometimes I can have a conversation. It depends if I have a meeting or am waiting with several 6 year olds making sure they get to the right person.) To reiterate, please don’t use the morning drop off time to communicate a concern. It’s important we all have a positive start to our day, including teachers! I work really hard to create a positive environment in the classroom. Because of that, it isn’t appropriate or helpful to have concerns voiced around children or to put that sort of energy into our room. It could be upsetting for children to overhear those types of conversations. I’ve given my personal cell number and my email to use for communication. Please start with one of those. I often give up my personal time to communicate with parents and prefer it over conversations with a classroom full of children. Thank you for respecting our classroom space! We have the following specials schedule: Monday: PE Tuesday: Music Wednesday: Library, Mandarin and PE (We get 90 minutes of team planning!) Thursday: Mandarin Friday: Art Please come to Back To School Night on September 8th 6:00- 7:30! The picture is of Harriet Tubman. Our first read aloud series will be on Women's History. I have loved witnessing the critical thinking happening while reading stories about influential women all over the world. I use Teaching For Change to create my booklist for read aloud. This is directly from their website: Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write and change the world. By drawing direct connections to real world issues, Teaching for Change encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens. Teaching for change supports my focus on providing an anti-bias education. As a white teacher and advocate for social change, I will always make sure all races are evident in our book choices and book choices eliminate barriers of misinformation and stereotypes. All read aloud books are pulled from a list for "elementary" students. Here is the list for Women's History: http://www.tfcbooks.org/best-recommended/womenshistory We will create graphic organizers of each book we read. We will have an anchor chart of all the character traits we witness in women through the world of books. Friday we read an amazing story about a girl from Afghanistan who had to sneak to go to school. It was a beautiful story that brought tears to my eyes. Read aloud is one of my favorite times to promote class discussions, a sense of community, and instill empathy in students. I have really appreciated the positive messages about our focus on social justice in the classroom! This is why I love first grade: Everyone got the same size paper to create their full body or face portrait for our Welcome Board! Along with mindfulness everyday after recess where we calm our bodies and minds in anticipation of learning, we end each day with Circle Up. Right now we are focusing on how to create our community. Friday I went around the circle and told each student something I like about them. Then we had a very intense "ceremony" to place our purple Vernon bracelets on. Instead of me printing out Learner Profiles we are creating our own posters of how to be "IB". We will be going through each one and students will work in partners to create pictures showing examples of each profile. For this activity, I picked the partner (sometimes they pick their partner) to intentionally see how students are interacting with each other. I was ecstatic at how well students worked together and loved seeing new friendships being formed. I really loved it when a partner asked to use our skin color crayons so their picture would represent all races in our classroom! Happy Ms. Havens. :) We found this song to help us remember how to be IB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tys9MnpgBOo. We LOVED it! Finally, we wrote gratitude letters to a neighbor that donated us a fan. I sent a plea on Nextdoor for someone to give us a fan to help cool down our classroom. A retired PPS teacher gave us a fan. We wrote her thank you cards. As much as I can, I will use real world scenarios to give students practice writing.
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