Back to School Fun and a Freebie!

In the words of lovable Lilly, "Wow...that is just about all I can say...wow." These last few weeks have been insane! I have been so busy with my nineteen new firsties and my roles as team leader,  teacher mentor, and mommy that I feel like I've barely had time to breathe! Not to mention, I caught the dreaded stomach bug during our first week of school and actually had to leave my new friends in the middle of the school day--yikes! (I hope to never, ever have to do that again--it was awful!) 

Anyways, I'm finally back to normal (well, some might say that) and I've got first week fun to share! This year, I did my Kissing Hand Writing and activities as usual, but I spruced up our class book a little bit, and I think it turned out quite cute, if I do say so myself!  Here it is if you'd like to use it with your friends, too!

By the way, I also hit a new world record with our hand painting--19 kiddos in 15 minutes flat! I cannot tell you how proud I was of myself, haha!

In addition to the Kissing Hand, we had lots of fun with Abby's Jitter Juice, and we even made a snack of our own! We called it our "Friendship Mix," and it was a really nice team-building activity. I gave each child a baggie of one particular snack. We talked about making a snack mix and how we would need lots of different things for it to taste really good. So, each child added his or her items to the "Friendship Mix" and added his or her name to our class chart. We talked about how neat it was that the snack mix tasted best with lots of different items, and it was similar to how our class is much better with all of our different friends. We even came up with the saying, "It takes a bunch to make a tasty munch!" All in all, it was a really nice way to end our first day together!

Back to School with The Kissing Hand

I'm finishing up my first week of school, and boy, has it been busy with meetings almost daily and lots of changes among our team and faculty! Hopefully, when things calm down, I'll have more time for blogging! Anyway, I have a pretty good class of twenty firsties this year, and we had a lot of fun getting to know each other this week! We did some Kissing Hand activities the first day, and lots of Deanna Jump's wonderful activities including her Rainbow Names, All About Me people, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Name Trees, and more! It was a blast! Here are some pics of our Kissing Hand activities...we made a hand/heart shaped circle map of our First Day Feelings. Then, we did a predictable chart telling how we felt on the first day. We also made some handprint art to send home with the parents this week at Parent Night.