First Day Fun

Welcome to the First day of 2nd Grade!

I think this is the first time I've every actually accomplished everything that was on my plans for the first day of school! ha!  I think it really helps that most everyone shows up on Meet the Teacher day and brings their supplies, so I don't have to spend a lot of time on that in the morning.

So, when they came in, I had some Play-Doh on their desk for them to play with while I ran round getting everyone squared away and talking with parents.  I keep them in their group buckets, for ease of putting away.

 Then, after a few minutes of getting myself calmed down and taking a few sips of coffee (ha! Teacher needs a moment), I bring them to the carpet and introduce our first book for the day, You're Finally Here! and did a cute little activity from Linda Kamp.

Then, I got them up and moving with the Snowball Name Game! They loved this game. I saw the idea on Jodi's Instagram (Fun in First)

Then we headed outside to take our First Week of School pictures for their memory books. My sign says first week of school, because sometimes I get to it on the first day, and sometimes I don't. So I give myself that leverage. ha!

Then we came back in and did some housekeeping... we labeled all their folders and notebooks.

Here's a little teacher tip for labels.... Print half of the sheet with all the labels for one student, so you can write their name going all the way down, cut down the middle, and then hand them the stickers. This went SO quickly this year because I finally (16 years later) had that smart thought. 

Then we headed out to activity - which meant it was my time to make sure our dismissal groups were all set up and ready to go for this afternoon (our dismissal is SUPER crazy! But it's a well oiled machine once we get it all set up!).

We came back in and had about 20 minutes before lunch, so I had them start on their Memory Books.  I forgot to take pictures, so this is from First Grade.  I start folders for the kids so that I can keep them all organized and can throw in the rest of the papers throughout the rest of the year.

This is what they look like all finished!

 Click the link to check them out on TpT

After lunch, we came back in and came to the carpet for another book, Listen, Buddy.  It's such a cute book, and perfect for a segway into Whole Body Listening.

I made this chart a few years ago and use it every year.

After we talk about it, then we do a directed drawing and they get to label the different parts of their body and what they use them for.

Then it was time for us to practice our dismissal. YES, we HAVE to practice dismissal. lol. It took us 45 minutes to figure out what would work best...but we got it! And when it came time to actual dismissal, it worked flawlessly!

Then it was time to get up and moving again! That's the trick... to alternate up and down activities throughout the day. 

This one was SUPER fun!

I played KidsBop music and they walked around (or danced around!) and when the music stopped, they found the nearest person to pair up with.

I told them the person with the shortest hair always went first. They grabbed an M&M and read the chart for the corresponding color. Once that person was finished, the other person went. We did a few rounds of this, and the kids asked for more!

Here's what they talked about with whatever color they picked out.

You can click THIS LINK to download a printable copy of this. I just hand wrote this real quick the day before.

Then it was time to pass out papers to go home, talk about our behavior plan (Class Dojo!), and pack up, and head out for recess....except as we were walking out, it started to rain, of course! ha! So we set up our GoNoodle account right then and there and did some indoor recess.  We did our end of the day "Ellen Selfie" and then we headed out the door to go home.

It was a GREAT first day!

I'll back next week to show what we did for our first week of school.

Also, you can read THIS POST that I did last year for our first few days of 2nd grade.

And HERE is some ideas from when I taught First Grade!