Our First Friday

Many people keep a daily or weekly journal or diary. Blogging is just another form of journaling. The class brainstormed to decide what we should include in our blog post. Then Ms. Day wrote the post. Next week, students will help to write the blog post.

We had a very busy Friday. It was only the second day of school, but we got started with our learning right away. We began our day with Math. We're reviewing addition. We did some of it the old fashioned way. We used white boards and markers, to solve problems. We talked about key words that help us to know whether to add, subtract, multiply or divide. While Ms. Day worked with those people, Mrs. Shepley helped people do math a new way. We used the iPads to practice our basic facts. Everyone got a chance to do it, and we had lots of fun.




At 9:00 we went downstairs for the first Tiger Pride Assembly of the year. The Phillips tiger was there. Children will earn Pawprints again this year. We have brand new ones with the year printed on them, so if you have a stash of old ones at home, throw them away. Mrs. Prior-Sweet gave a Homework Coupon to each person who had no detentions and no Buddy Room visits last year. We had lots of people in our room who earned them. She also gave certificates for a free McDonald's smoothie to all the people who had NEVER EVER had a buddy room visit or detention in the whole time they have been at Phillips. Ms. Day was so impressed that so many people in our class follow the Code of Respect every single day of school.



In the morning we also had art. The art teacher, Mrs. Rasmussen, is not new to Phillips, but she is new to us. She talked with the class about how paintings tell stories. We studied faces and masks, and looked at how unique each individual is. Then students created drawings with one side a mask, and the other side a self portrait.

We have two specials on Friday. From art, everyone went to Core Knowledge with Mrs. Hawkins. They played a game to get to know each other again after being away all summer.

The first Friday was a very successful day of the school year.

Our Social Contract

Today was the very first day of school, and we had a great day. We talked about rules and safety. We took a tour of the lunchroom, and reviewed how everything works. We learned about the "Daily 5" for reading and writing. We spent time reading.

We also spent some time talking about the ways that kids want to be treated, and we brainstormed words to describe that. We talked about how teachers want to be treated, and we made a list to describe that. We talked about how we want to be treated when we work with a group, and we came up with even more words to describe that. When we looked at our list, we saw that the word respect was listed six times. Fair was mentioned five times, friendly was listed five times.

Ms. Day put all the words into a Wordle. The bigger the word, the more important it was to the class. We all signed the poster to say that this is how we want to be treated, and this is how we will treat each other. It's going to be a great year!

If you are interested in learning about Wordles, you can make your own Wordle by going to Wordle.net. Just a warning, students should be supervised on this website, because there may be adult material present somewhere on the website.