Daily Blog: Mr. McMurray

Today was the first day of school and we're off to a great start! I welcomed all of the boys and girls in Room 16 and introduced the class to our curriculum for the year. One of the first things I shared with the class was our Focus Wall, which features all of the components of our English Language Arts program.

FOCUS WALL

Language Arts

I also took a moment to share a little bit about myself with the class. And then we moved to some of the items I distributed to the class. Our primary focus was the black binder which contains pretty much everything we'll be doing workwise in class. It has packets for warm-ups (handwriting and geography), language arts, math, science, an early finisher's packet, and the Quarterback Club in it. Basically, a lot of stuff!

The class got to work on the first day's worth of warm-up problems which we then corrected. The kids learned about the different elements of a map and what a political map is. I also monitored their handwriting skills and encouraged them to develop a habit of improving their penmanship.

Our next activity was entitled Howdy Partner! It's a getting-to-know-you type of activity that involves moving around the room and having your classmates sign the squares on your sheet for you. Things like "traveled by train somewhere this summer," "have an autograph of a famous person," "was born in another state," and so on. After five minutes, we shared out and learned a lot about our new class and the interesting things about each other.

Once we completed that sharing out, we transitioned to our math lesson for the day. That involved learning some math vocabulary by reading sentences that had words such as digit, value, place-value system, and other words from our first math chapter on whole numbers and decimals. When we completed this introductory math activity, I led the class to recess.

The class regrouped in line after recess and we took a brief walking tour around the campus. I took a class picture in the garden and we zig-zagged around the school and back to the classroom for our language arts lesson of the day.

Back in class, we kicked things off with a short story called A Little Coaching. It's a piece from the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and the purpose for reading was "listening for enjoyment." I stopped at different points throughout the story and we learned about how a boy overcame a challenge at summer camp that had to do with running a race.

This segued into a couple of lessons on the focus skill (plot: conflict and resolution) and focus strategy (using story structure). We also covered our robust vocabulary for the selection and answered questions about each of the six words.

Close to noon, we were ready to wrap up the language arts lesson, and I introduced our activities for the rest of the day. First of all, the kids were going to begin working on a Bio Poem which we hope to have ready for Back to School Night, and a little survey entitled, What Makes a Great Teacher?

The kids were ready for lunch by 12:30pm and I met them again at 1:10pm after recess. Back in class, I had the students open their new language arts books to begin reading silently, Rope Burn, which is the first selection in our ELA program this year. I had a journal prompt on the board which was a character description the class had to answer after reading for about 25 minutes. Some volunteers shared what they discovered about Richard, the main character.

From there, I distributed a self-portrait template to the class which is the background for the Bio Poem and a little something for the kids to fill out called, The Perfect Classroom. They have to design their idea of the perfect classroom, and so there were a wide variety of ideas of what we'll need to add to our room to make it that much better!

With about 20 minutes to go I brought out a chart with our 20 spelling words on it that have closed syllable patterns and short vowel patterns. The class sorted the words quickly on the overhead projector and then we organized our binders and labeled the tabs in them before it was time to get out our binder reminders.

Homework was distributed, the class got their bags packed, chairs stacked, and I thanked them for their hard work before sending them home at the 2:50pm bell. Here's to a great day and I'm looking forward to the rest of the week!

~Mr. McMurray