Drum roll please….

We will:

• Be Safe
• Be Kind
• Take Care of our School and Supplies
• Help Each Other Learn
• Have Fun

It's been 12 days in the making and I'm happy to announce that we've established our GUIDELINES and EXPECTATIONS for our classroom. This activity is part of the Positive Discipline program where together we created a shared vision for the classroom. We started by sharing ways we could make this year a great one. After collecting 40-or-so ideas, we put the ideas into the categories listed above. In groups we brainstormed what we would say and do in order to be safe, kind, take care of our school and supplies, help each learn and have fun. We then discussed and revised these as a group and created several drafts. Finally we've fancied them up and each gave it our stamp of approval by signing our names (in pen, not blood:). 

The guidelines will be kept alive throughout the year and will give us a frame to pause and reflect and increase our awareness of the world around us. They will be reviewed and practiced over and over again. 

We have been establishing our routines and having fun, well, at least I have! For more updates, ask your child to tell you more about:

• High-10
• Hawaii
• Class Cheers
• Guess My Number
• Magnifying our stories

It was so fun to have my "tita Ces" (Ms. Cecelia) come and work with our class on Wednesday. She was in town from San Diego and was a featured artist at the Victoria Chalk Festival. I've grown up with my aunt's talents and I was extra proud to have her as a guest artist with our kids. In class we have been studying the book Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. We coupled this book study with an owl art piece keeping the bird enthusiasts in mind! The students had fun putting their own creative twist on their owls and sharing their work with the class. 

The kids particularly enjoyed this time lapse she did for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles premiere. 
Caution: art accompanied by (clean) rap music :) 

It's great to have you on board! Now that I have our current class receiving our classroom blog, I can fill you in with what we've been up to. The past 9 days have been spent getting to know one another and establishing classroom routines. We have been doing a lot of work establishing our classroom guidelines. are already experts in reading and writing workshop, started our first unit in math, have had regular class meetings and that's not all! 

New book baggies and reading logs went home on Monday. Like the orange folder, book baggies are to be returned to school everyday. The goal if for your child to read at least 100 minutes a week, outside of school. Reading logs are collected on Mondays. 

Parents sure have a lot of homework to begin the year! Please take this time to complete the volunteer form I sent home and the paperwork from the QAE school packet. There is also a $50.00 fee to cover classroom supplies. If you haven't done so already, please make checks to the order of QAE and send to school at your earliest convenience.

Further updates will be on the way! We will read our blogs as a class and share comments left by all of you. Please let us know you're out there by leaving comments and asking questions.

Many thanks to:

We all have day one under our belts! It was a day spent getting to know one another and going over routines, routine, routines! We interviewd a classmate and will spend the next few days introducing our friends to the class. The next few weeks will be designated to building a strong classroom foundation, one where we can all thrive and feel safe to take risks. We ended our day reading the book, On a Beam of Light, a story about Albert Einstein who asked countless questions and spent every moment wondering. While Einstein answered many life mysteries he also left us the gift of big-open questions for us to ponder. In my opinion, children are the most creative and curious beings-full of wonder. "How do you make ice cream?" "How do planets orbit?" "How does gravity work?" "How big is the universe?" "Why are legos so awesome?", are just a few wonders our students came up with today. Today was the first of many of tapping into the ingenious minds and asking big questions.