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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