Week 1 Done!

I had my kiddos in class on Wednesday and it was great. I am excited. I am also really excited about this only having to plan for two subjects thing. I have never had this before and it is kind of awesome. I am sad because I do LOVE teaching reading and won't be this year, but it is really integrated into social studies so I will still sort of teach reading.

We have a pretty good schedule worked out and I am excited to have our first real week.
I had some fun ideas this week for social studies that I wanted to share.

We teach Ohio state history in fourth grade, so I had the kids write down everything they know or think they know about Ohio. We talked about it and they are going to keep their list all year and then do the same thing on the last day of school! I think it will be so fun for them to compare and see how much they have learned.

We also talked about text features and how important they are in reading non-fiction. We made a list of a bunch of different text features by looking through our books. The kids made a bingo board on a piece of paper and just filled in 9 boxes with a different text feature. When I called out the text feature, if they had it on their board, they could put an x on it, but they also had to find an example in their Ohio text book. They loved it and I am hoping that it will help them remember to use text features while reading non-fiction.

We did a fun math activity too called math about me. They had to write their name in large letters in the middle of their paper and then come up with at least 5 equations that told me something about them.

For example: 3 +2 = 5 I have 3 sisters and 2 brothers. It was pretty cute and now they are all hanging up in our classroom.

We also came up with our classroom contract and everyone signed their name agreeing to follow our classroom rules.

I also got some new great ideas on Interactive notebooking from here. I am going to try this this year. I might not start it til part way through the year though because I am just trying to get settled right now, but I think it is an AWESOME idea. I can't wait!