A little bit of CHEVRON goes a long way

        It's amazing what a little bit of color can do for a classroom! I bought a new rug for my house yesterday and decided to bring the old one to school.  I plopped the old one in front of my math board, and BAM!, instant curb appeal.  It is chevron, by the way.  (I'm obsessed.)  Of course, the kids liked it.  Then again, they pretty much get excited about EVERYTHING! And, no, that is not an exaggeration.  Here's a typical class conversation:

Me: Class, we are going to work on  <insert weekly skill here> today.

Class: Yaaaaay! Wahoooo! Awesome! You're the best teacher ever!!!!!

(Sometimes I even get a "You're the best teacher in the universe!" Hahaha! Talk about an ego boost! Those of you who teach upper grades probably think I'm making this up, but I promise I'm not!  It definitely makes classroom life easier!)

So, back to today.  The class was very well behaved today considering we've been out for several days due to snow and freezing temperatures.  Hopefully, I haven't jinxed myself by saying that! We worked on silent e words and ordinal numbers (which I have a super cute math center to go with later this week) plus a whole lot of phonics/phonemic awareness/sentence writing/comprehension/reading/small group/whole group/centers/partner talk/contractions/skip counting thrown in.  There is soooo much to learn in 1st grade! Let me repeat that:

There is sooooo much to learn in 1st grade!

 

I've got to say it's really fun though.  I like being able to see the kids' excitement and growth from day to day. The class is working on foundational skills that the rest of their academic life will be based on.  It has to be a strong foundation.  As a certain football coach might say, the kids are building their foundation brick by brick. Or, in my case, rug by rug. :)