The beginning of Kindergarten…NEVER an easy task! But, 13 years in, and I think this might have been my best first day ever!!! No criers, no tantrums, no fits….just fun!!!

OMGoodness, you guys!!! How is it already Fall??? I’m sooo behind on posting!! Going to try to do some catching up!! So, we’ve been in school for 30 days already!!! We are in the swing of things! And, despite the large number of Kindergarten students I have this year…I am VERY lucky!!! What a GREAT class I have! #solucky

I’m going to go back 30 days and show you what we did at the beginning of our year!

THE MOST important thing you can do in those first few days of school is focusing on procedures and routines. Teach your students what your expectations are. Model, model, model! Practice, practice, practice. And you will be a happy teacher and your students will be happy, feel safe and be comfortable too! Which is a MUST in Kindergarten!

Playdoh is a MUST for the first couple of weeks of Kindergarten!! I love having it out on their tables when they come in in the morning! Playdoh=Fun!! It makes things seem a little less scary and a lot more fun!! There are sooooo many less tears and kids are having fun instead of having anxiety! Last year, I decided to personalize their Playdoh to make it even a little more special when they came in. Seriously! ZERO criers!!

You can grab the editable Playdoh labels for FREEEEEE by clicking on the image below!

On our very first day of Kindergarten, we have to figure out where everything is and meet the people we need to know in the building. So, first thing, we read The Kissing Hand by Audery Penn. After we read the story, we discover that Chester Raccoon has left a letter for us! He sends us on a hunt through the school, taking us to each room that we need to find and meeting lots of people along the way. This helps to familiarize the kids with faces and places in our school and makes things seem safe and friendly.

Chester even leaves us a treat at the end of our hunt!!

You can grab the Hunt HERE!!!

At the end of the day, we also do this cute and super simple, little Chester name craft!! The pieces in the patterns are laid out so that the teacher can just chop them apart and give them to the students. This craft requires very little cutting and is PERFECT for the first day of Kindergarten!!!

You can grab the craftivity HERE!

During our first week of school, we also work on the first month of our Kindergarten portfolio pages. I LOVE our portfolio and memory book!! It’s SUCH a great way to track progress!!! It’s also a great assessment tool AND it has plenty of pages to help record Kindergarten memories too!!! It makes such a great keepsake for the end of the year!!!

You can check out the Kindergarten portfolio HERE!!

Like I said, THE most important thing to focus on in these first few weeks of school is teaching procedures, routines and expectations! I did a post on my Problem Solvers pack a while back. You can read it HERE.

Tattling can get to be a HUGE problem!! And, it can be just exhausting!!! It’s easy for us, as teachers to complain about tattling. But, have you ever stepped back and asked yourself if you’ve ever TAUGHT your kids how to solve the problem by themselves???

I like to read the David Stories when we are talking about solving problems. How could David have been a problem SOLVER instead of a Problem CAUSER? The pack comes with this cute craftivity. It’s a super simple craft for the beginning of the year with very little cutting.

I am constantly asking my class…how could you solve that problem?? We refer to our anchor chart when we need to.

Here we are signing our pledge…

Have you guys read Decibella?!? It’s THE perfect little book for teaching voice levels at school!!! I just LOVE it!!! And, I made this little pack to go along with it. Voice levels is something that you need to reinforce constantly. “What kind of voice are you using?” “What kind of voice should you be using?” “Show me what that sounds like.”

You can check out the Decibella pack by clicking on the picture below.