First Day of School!

 T: Good morning, friends! Happy first day of school! We are so excited to have you all in room 103 this year. We are going to have so much fun! We will play, make new friends, explore, and try so many new things. 

*We all said good morning to the friend sitting next to us! We all either said “good morning ____.” Or, just chose to give a nice wave.* 

T: I have a very important thing to tell you about our meetings. One of us, either Miss Kopp or I, will be typing the things that you all say during our morning meetings. Your words are so important. Your ideas, opinions, stories… they all matter. In order for either Miss Kopp or I to hear your words, we have a signal. It goes like this… *Raises hand* … and when you raise your hand, that lets us know that you have something to share. When your hand is not raised, you will stay quiet and listen to your friends. Each morning, we will all have an opportunity to share something with each other.

For our very first morning discussion, I am going to ask you… what did you have for breakfast this morning? You can raise your hand if you would like to share with the class! 

Nathaniel: strawberries and blueberries. 

Troy: French toast and syrup. 

Luke: I didn’t really have anything. 

Alex: Waffles. 

Josephine: Pears.

Caroline: I had cereal and blueberries and yogurt.  

Cian: Oatmeal and watermelon and eggs and bananas. T: That’s a big breakfast!

Camille: Oatmeal squares. 

Griffin: Oatmeal, eggs, and a banana. T: Lots of oatmeal lovers in here! 

Daniel: What I had for breakfast today was two bagels. 

Gwen: I had a banana on the way here!

Ashton: Toast, sugar toast. And I got banana. 

Andie: 2 Butter bagels. 

Alexander: I had eggs. 

Forest: Oatmeal. 

Quinn: I had lemonade and cereal. 

Naomi: Um, my mom didn’t give me anything for breakfast. T: Well, that is okay, because soon we will have our morning snack. 

T: I am so proud you all remembered the signal and didn’t let any words pop out unless giving the signal!  We are going to have meetings like this every morning, and then we are going to have worktime 1. Worktime 1 is your choice. However, where you choose is where you will stay for the short amount of time that is worktime 1. Worktime 1 happens every day, usually right after our morning meeting. For worktime 1, you will all get to have a choice as to what area you would like to explore in our classroom. Is there anything you are wondering about our first day of school? 

Alex: I don’t know anyone's name. 

T: Hm… How would you learn someone’s name? Caroline?

Caroline: I think I would just ask another person and then they would say their name. 

T: Do you want to ask someone in our circle? 

Caroline: What’s your name? 

Naomi: Naomi. 

Griffin: Do we eat a snack? 

T: Yes, we all eat a snack together, right after worktime 1. 

T: I want everyone to stay right where they are, and I am going to show you all of the spaces in our room that are going to be available for you to explore during worktime 1. This area is the blocks. When you are exploring and building with our blocks, it is important that you never build above your shoulders. These are bins, and inside you will find magnets, or animals, and other things that you can use while playing with our blocks. you can use these when you are building with our blocks. And when we are done, we put all the materials back in the bins and put the lids on top. 

Our library is up in the treehouse. You can go up and read books. You can even go up there with a friend! 2 friends are allowed in our treehouse.

This is our kitchen space. You can play, you can cook, and you can play with our dress up silks! You could have a cape, you could have pink hair, you could be so many things!

Our light table is a box that lights up, and you can use these materials to build things on our light table. 

Daniel: My baby brother is only 3 and his symbol is a hedgehog. T: Just like Ashton’s symbol!

Next we have the message center. Our message center looks like this. You can write messages and put them in the boxes. Messages can be written through words or pictures. You can make them for your family, or for a friend in the class! 

This is called our sensory bin. It is not open in the mornings when you come in, because our lunch sticks sit on top of it! Inside, there is sand and shovels. The materials inside the sensory bin get switched out every once and a while. 

This area over here is our art studio. In the art studio, we can paint, color, draw, and do arts and crafts! We also use the tables in our art studio space to eat our morning and afternoon snacks.  

The most important part of our classroom… all the way in the corner, by the library, there are 2 bathrooms. Do you have to ask to go to the bathroom? No! Anytime you have to use the restroom, just stop what you are doing, and go. If we are outside, though, make sure you find a teacher and a teacher will take you to the bathroom.  

Okay… now we are ready to move into worktime 1! We have our circle spots here, but in room 103, we also have something called our smartboard spots. So, let’s all stand up and go find a spot in front of the smartboard! We use the smartboard to choose where we would like to work during worktime 1. After worktime 1, we will eat our morning snack!