Change is good, right?

Big changes are in store for me this coming school year.  After 15 years of teaching first grade, 4 in New Hampshire and 11 here at DBS, I will be changing jobs.  This year I will begin training to become a certified Reading Recovery teacher.  The Reading Recovery portion will be half of my job description, the other half will be title 1 reading support for grades K-2.  I will miss being in the classroom with the kids, but I am looking forward to the change.

Field Day Fun

For the first time in DBS history, grades K-4 joined the 5th graders during their field day.  After lunch, we headed out to the field to join in the fun!  We played steal the frisbee, tug-o-war, cooperative hula hoop passing, water balloon toss and the most popular; dunk tank!  We had the opportunity to sink Mrs. Wood and then some of us also got to try to sink Mr. D!  When the fun was over, the PTO brought out popsicles for everyone.  It was a very fun end to a great year.

PULL!!

Prepare your water balloons!

Poor, brave Mrs. Wood!

Tomorrow we will be finishing up some projects, cleaning out desks and getting ready for Wednesday's events.  We have an assembly in the morning and step-up day as well.  These should be a very busy last two days.  Thank you for all your support this year!

Being A Hen

So, it's clear that my teammates and I were not cut out to be mother hens.  We thought for sure that none of our 12 eggs had anything growing in them.  We candled them in a dark closet together and were sad that we would have to break the news to our students who were so excited to have chicks.  We contemplated just bringing some chicks into the classroom and pretending the eggs had hatched knew we had to be honest.  We had the hard conversations, but promised to keep turning the eggs through the 21 days just in case.  You can imagine our excitement when the first chick arrived!  We were happier than the students!!

Today is the day we say goodbye to the chicks (there ended up being 5 of them!).  They will go home with me for a few days until Mrs. Vielleux is ready to take them to her house to live with her chickens.  I am so glad this activity had a happy ending!  Here is a picture of the cute little chickies!

Progress

This week, I gave the students their May journals and asked them to look through them and tell me what they noticed.  They said they noticed nice writing, spaces between words, words spelled correctly and lots of sentences. 

Then, I gave them their journals from September and asked them to look through them and tell me what they noticed.  It was really funny to watch their reactions.  They couldn't believe the way their words looked.  One person even said, "This is a disaster!"  

I love to do this with my first graders since they have a hard time understanding just how much they have learned.  This is a concrete, visual way for them to see that they HAVE come so far in such a short amount of time.  

I hope you were able to see their journals and notice the huge improvement.  They were pretty excited about themselves!

The Day We Went to Billings Farm

Mr. D says goodbye and behave!

The cow barn...they each eat 100 pounds per day!

On your mark, get set, go!

Can you see the cream?

Old fashioned games.

In the museum.

Annie the sheep.

Say hello to the jersey cow.

Learning about Annie and wool. 

Meeting the calves.

"I know! I know!"

The "first grade" calves.

What if you were Charlotte?

We have completed reading Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.  At the conclusion of this read-aloud, the students were asked to pretend that they were Charlotte and choose a word to write in their web.

3 Piggy Opera

Amazing, amazing, amazing!!!  The kids did so great!  In case you missed it or just want to see it again, here is the video of yesterday's performance.