My Second First Day!

Today was the first day of my second year of teaching! Go me!

We had a half day, and it went AMAZINGLY well. Like, I was boggled as to what was happening in my classroom. They got a little squirrely in the last hour or so, but they're essentially all BFFs who haven't seen each other in a few months... so I wasn't too tough on them. :)

We started Daily Five today, and it went crazy well. Last year when I tried to launch D5, we read to ourselves for 17 seconds on the first day.

17. Seconds.

Today I actually had to stop them at 3 minutes! I almost died. I told them afterwards that I was AMAZED and I couldn't believe what was happening, haha! Then we walked down the hall in complete silence with our hands behind our backs and our bubbles in our mouths.

It wasn't all perfect! I did forget to collect their supplies, which led to general craziness at dismissal time. We enjoyed some Jitter Juice (courtesy of Abby), which was very fun!

 But it was a little too unstructured for us on the first day.  I'm sure it's just the way I taught it, because it was super fun and the activities were awesome! I learned quickly that we need lots of structure in my class. And that's cool, I can work with it. :)

So, tomorrow's another day! We're launching Writer's Workshop (which is new for all of us) and learning the 3 ways to read a book! And some math stuff too. :)

Question for ya - tomorrow we have our Technology special, but our Tech teacher isn't coming in. I want to take my class to the computer lab just to get us into the routine. Any thoughts on what we can do while we're there for 30 minutes?