First Week Down! (or "Why Am I in School on a Saturday?") and Michael Phelps

Whew!  First week down!

I have to laugh...a lot of my parents warned me at Open House on Monday that their darlings were good, but talked a lot.  I just smiled and replied that we have a very active classroom and even in our "down times" there's usually some music (Kids Bop!) playing in the background.

Score one for parents.  They are DEFINITELY talkers!  I finally had to blow my whistle (which is very shrill) at one point...things seemed to get better after that!

But, they are a nice bunch....I haven't seen a mean action out of one of them....but I can already tell my work is cut out for me.  I have a feeling I may be spending a lot of weekend days in school preparing for the week.  While I have a lot of good things I created/planned last year, this group might need some extra help in other areas that I didn't need to create last year.

I feel better this year, starting out, because I DO have a great group of resources to go to that I didn't realize existed at this time last year...Pinterest, teacher blog land, TpT, TN.....so I can either be inspired, or use someone else's "perspiration."  (Okay, that sounded gross...sorry...but you know what I mean!).

We did "personality bags" on Friday (school started Wednesday...I have mixed feelings about the short week...yes, it's great to get to Friday earlier, but I did NOT like having only half a day to work between Open House and First Day!).  If you haven't done these before, it teaches you so much about your students!  I haven't done them previously (my teammates did) because I did other "getting to know you" activities, but I realized something listening to my students on Friday....it's all fine and good for the students to get to know each other, but this was a FANTASTIC way for ME to get to know THEM.  

So, we had fun and the kids got to guess whose bag it was before the owner revealed him/herself.  I now know that:
1.  Pokemon is still alive and well and is an obsession of quite a lot of my students!
2.  Star Wars and super heroes are still key....and so are Legos and motorcycles.....with my boys (and some girls!).
3.  My students are impressed that I know what Ninjago is and could name some of the superheroes they brought in!
4.  I have a LOT of swimmers in my class (and they all brought in swim goggles...too cute!).

I could go on, but have to share what one of my girls did....it was great!

She showed us her swim goggles (each child got to explain what they brought after we guessed whose bag it was) and explained that she has ADHD just like Michael Phelps.  She told them that he was able to use all his extra energy to win gold medals.  I LOVE that she compared herself to him!  It about made me cry!  She went on to pull out a piece of "gold" to represent his medals, and went on to explain to her classmates that nothing ever holds you back.

So, I'll end on that note today.  That, and I need to get back to work....since my stack is still staring at me :(.  Hopefully I will publish pictures next week of something super cool the students are doing :)  Until then, have a great weekend and good luck with your preparations for back-to-school!