Week 1 & Pre-Assessment!

Well all last week I was busy pre-assessing all my new little monkeys. I definitely have my work cut out for me this year! I have about 9 students that still haven't mastered their letter sounds! I'm pretty used to my students not being able to understand much English when they first arrive at school, but WOW, this group is going to be a challenge to find ways to communicate with them. Thank god for Ariel, my wonderful Taiwanese co-teacher! If it weren't for her translations, we wouldn't have gotten anything accomplished. Thankfully this week I am already seeing an improvement in them as they are starting to learn the rules and get into the daily routines. AND they are starting to remember some of their English!

For my writing pre-assessment this year I decided to use the "My First Week in First Grade" journals that I picked up from  the "Fun with Firsties"package from Babbling Abby. The students really enjoyed making them and I was able to get a pretty good assessment of their writing abilities from the journals. We will be putting these into our Progress Folders in a few weeks after they have been displayed for awhile. I always have the students complete a year end reflection journal and it's going to be great to have a journal from their first week of Grade One for them to reflect on and see how much their writing has improved since the first week of school. I also had the kids cut out the pages themselves as I thought it would be neat to also compare their fine-motor (scissor cutting) skills from the start of the year with the end of the year.

My First Week of First Grade - Pre-Assessment

I love the honesty of this little monkey, for his friends page he wrote "I don't know yet."

Monkey Work

Ariel and I chose a monkey theme for our classroom this year. Last year our classroom was monster themed but we always end up calling our students "little monkeys" so we figured we should "monkey" up our classroom this year too. For this bulletin board I used green paper twine and hung it from 3m hooks on the sides and in the middle so that the "vine" can support all their monkey work. I then used clothespins to pin up their work. I bought monkey accents when I was back in Canada this summer with the intentions of gluing them onto the clothespins, but I ended up using them as name tags because they easily clip onto their uniform so they can wear them when they go to the special's classes. 

Star Work

We played some ice-breaker games to help the students learn about each other and get comfortable in class. They really liked playing People Bingo, but I think their favourite was My New Friend partner activity that was also included in the "Fun with Firsties" package. We displayed their "New Friends" on our Star Work board. This display board is a bit different as I just used paper and borders to make a display board on the concrete walls. Last year I tried hanging up their work just using sticky-tack but taking off their work always seemed to be a problem as the sticky-tack melted too much and I would rip the paper. This year I used double-sided tape and hung up plastic page protectors so I can easily put in and take out work. I'm hoping this will last all year. 

Find "Fun with Firsties" package here