Welcome to Virginia!

Virginia is for Lovers Bloggers!

A lovely group of Virginia bloggers would like to help usher in the new school year by extending a bit of southern hospitality.  You can follow along the blog hop to visit 20+ Virginia teacher blogs for terrific teaching tips and fun freebies to help get your new school year off to a great start.

So, many of you might be already back to school and some are enjoying the last weeks of summer. I'd like to share a few tips of my first day/week with my kinders. It has now been 2 years since my last first day with kinders so this will be very helpful for me to refresh too.  Last year I taught first grade and so I'm use to second graders really. I definitely have to put my mind back to what it's like with pre-schoolers who are beginning kindergarten. It will be very different, I know but I am so excited to get back to those kinders!!

Day 1 Checklist: 

- get kids to school

- feed the kids lunch

- get the kids back home to the right place

I start every morning by greeting the students at the classroom door with an expectation that they will greet me too. Usually, once my routines have been taught, my students then follow a flow chart to get unpacked and started for the day. Now on the first day, since the kiddos are new, I greet them and invite them into the room to sit on the carpet until everyone has arrived. After the morning announcements, I model each step that will make up our flow chart. I do not create the flow chart with the students on the first day because it is all new for them. Instead, I might just use the picture clues while I model the routine.   I don't have a picture of a previous flow chart and honestly they have changed a lot over the years until I found a routine that I new worked really well. So I have decided to make a picture of a flow chart and then offer my flow chart pictures and fonts/cues as my freebie. I use this for my kinders but there is no doubt that this couldn't be adapted to other grades. 

Now...if you teach upper grades, I believe you could just print this and talk to your students about how to 

come in and unpack in your classroom and what your specific expectations were.  After making this in powerpoint, I now know that I would like to take pictures of the specific areas that the kids will do these things and put those on my flow chart so it is more realistic.  These images are either from powerpoint clip art or from the internet (Really Good Stuff and my smartboard image).  

So...what you have all been waiting for.  I have given you the pictures in multiple ways so that you can use them the best you can in your classroom.  I have also given you the typed words that I use in the chart above. The font is Kevin and Amanda's "Annoying Kettle" size 30 if you would like to type your name and paste it over "the teacher" to make it more personal.  I hope you are able to use this freebie (click the picture below to download from my TpT store).  Please feel free to leave me some feedback either on TpT or below in my comments so that I can make updates if needed! 

Thanks for following along for such a long post.  The next stop on the hop is