Running Man

Today was a great day, but I did have one little guy who was NOT having anything to do with being in my classroom. He showed up yesterday at the wrong time, so today was his first day and he was really wishing that he was in the same class as a friend/cousin of his. He refused to come over to the carpet with the rest of the class and as I was doing activities he kept creeping closer and closer to the door.

Then, he was off...heading down the hall...towards the other AM Kinder room. I got my cardio in trying to get him back, but thankfully, the rest of the kiddos were super well behaved when I was trying to get this kiddo to calm down and join us. Eventually he participated and made a traffic light with the rest of the kids, but he did not want to leave his chair at the table and would not come over to the carpet. Hopefully tomorrow he will feel more comfortable. Since we read The Kissing Hand yesterday, I brought in my little Racoon stuffed animal and all the kids had the chance to give him a hug. Anytime there was a moment of upset throughout the day today, one of my boys would go and get Chester the Raccoon and bring him to whichever kid was upset so they could hug him. So sweet! At the end of my day the kiddos in the PM class asked if they could hug Chester again.

Our major project for the day was making a traffic light out of construction paper, which gave me a chance to work on hand raising, not calling out, the "give me five" rule, and how to use the glue bottles. We have these awesome special lids that only require the kids to press down in order for the glue to come out. There is no mess and no twisting of the orange caps which then get left open. Awesome and so easy for Kindergartners! I passed out baskets that had all of the materials (glue, red circles, yellow circles, green circles, and a traffic light poem) and both groups did a great job of waiting until I assigned certain kids with the job of taking a certain item out of the bucket and passing it out to the rest of the kids in their group. They stopped each time I asked them to stop so that we could do the project just one step at a time and it went really smoothly. It took much less time the second time around because the afternoon group is smaller.

They also rocked out the morning greeting circle. I taught them that when the good morning song comes on, they should put their crayons and pencils away and come to the alphabet carpet and sit in a circle. Right before I played the song, I mentioned how I hoped they would remember to come to the carpet when I played the morning song so they would recall my expectations for the procedure that we had practiced yesterday. As soon as the song came on, they immediately came to the carpet and it literally took less than 15 seconds for them to be seated in a beautiful oval. By the time whichever Beatle that was singing got to his lyrics after a few good mornings, they were all ready to go. That same routine often took the entire length of the song in with some of my first graders. We did have to review that all crayons should be put away and chairs should be pushed in, but they were so enthusiastic about fixing their tables up and then came to the carpet right away when I replayed the song. So cute! We played the name game again and this time they had to introduce their partner instead of saying their own name. We talked about how they could ask the person their name if they weren't sure and they were so cute getting close and whispering "what's your name?" so they could share. Even some kids who I thought didn't speak a whole lot of English spoke up and raised their hands to answer today.

Tomorrow I am going to try introducing some of the materials that will be available during work station time with 5 minutes of modeling followed by 10 minutes of "exploration time." The kids have been asking about lots of the materials they have seen on the shelves and are curious about when they will get to play, so I think they are in need of some unstructured time (well, not entirely unstructured, but not stop and go with continuous directions). I would like to have them try out the Unifix Cubes and the letter beads. We are going to try out some patterns too so I can attempt to plug activities into my real schedule in preparation for next week!

So happy that it's almost Friday!