Mrs. West's Class: Ready, Set, Go! Back to School 2013!

Woohoo! It's back to school time y'all! Welcome to our class. I am so excited to share with you all the fun stuff we are doing throughout the school year...This year, our theme is "safari." So, my outside wall is safari and the little gift baggies on the desk too...but safari doesn't say happy or inviting to me....so the inside will remain rainbows and colors (in ROY G BIV of course). Enjoy looking at the pictures of our first week back at school along with a little of my friends who I met at "Meet the Teacher" night. :)

My "wish list" from Meet the Teacher night.... I have awesome parents that want to help in any way they can.. either by donating their time or items that we may need.

The desks at "Meet the Teacher" night. Parent info. packet, Sweet Dreams ready confetti for the night before school starts, an info. magnet for parents, a monkey goodie bag for my little VIP's and of course the rainbow name tag on the chair!

Up close of the monkey goodie bags... "I am 'WILD' about you being in my class! Love, Mrs. West" ...and I am too :)

My wild bunch of kiddos :) (Hopefully not too wild, just wild with imagination and creativity, right?)

The classroom setup pre-Meet the Teacher Night

again

My first Meet the Teacher friend....Caden

A.J.

Emily

Mason

Morgan

Isabella

Caprice

Abigail

Jake

Blake

Carter

Akilah

London

Elizabeth

I had Janki (on the right) last year, but she came back and visited me, AND her sister wanted to take a picture, so here you go :)

then she wanted to take one of us.... but...she told Janki to get out of the pictures...soooo

JUST ME! (my little photographer told me I could get her anytime I needed to out of her K-5 class if I needed her assistance in picture taking...mental note taken)

Blaine

Elijah

Makarley

Reese

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL PICS WOOHOO EXCITEMENT HERE WE COME (Elijah)

Brody

Reese (and it was her birthday ...how cool is that?)

Lucas

London

Jaden

Mason

Morgan

Abigail

Briana

Eric

A.J.

Caden

Makarley

Emily

Caprice

Jake

Blake

Elizabeth

Akilah

Blaine

Brayden

Carter

Isabella (and a hand heart)

Waiting for their names to be called for "car riders" ...too cute

Our "How we get Home" graph

more car riders :)

and more

Bye Carter!

On Tuesday, we read Chrysanthemum and talked about bullying. We talked about how this is Chrysanthemum's heart....

and every time Chrysanthemum heard something negative about herself from someone else, we crumpled our "heart"

and every time Chrysanthemum heard something positive about herself from someone else, we smoothed our "heart"

but no matter if you say you are sorry after crumpling or wrinkling someone's heart, you still leave wrinkles in their heart which can't be completely taken out. So, instead of having to say you are sorry, we are pledging to avoid saying negative things to others at all.

"Before you speak, think and be smart, it's hard to fix a wrinkled heart!" We wrote our names on these band-aids and tried to fix the heart...we have this hung in our room to help us remember throughout the year to be kind and to be a peacemaker rather than being a bully.

We read "The Crayon Box That Talked" and created a big picture "TOGETHER" using all of the crayons so that we could show how working together makes a prettier picture than working alone and excluding others. Our class was really good at showing teamwork!

We also shared our favorite books with our friends at our groups to discuss why these books are our favorites and what we enjoy about them.

We read "David Goes To School" and talked about how David was a peace breaker not following the rules. So we discussed different ways to be peace makers and created our own "David" telling one way to be a peacemaker.

I taught them how to use our book baskets and how to treat books nicely. Look at how sweet they are during our reading time.

We read "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" and creating our own spilt milk (cloud) pictures...they had to decide what their "spilt milk" (Cloud) looked like and add details.