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Over the course of this semester, we read the First Six Weeks of School book from Responsive Classroom. This book acted as a guide for the beginning of the school year by providing readers with schedules and plans for the first day of school as well as the first weeks of school. Along with the schedules and plans full of sample activities broken up by grade level, this book stresses the importance of creating a positive classroom environment from day one of school. The first weeks of the  year should be centered around creating that positive classroom environment where students will learn and develop over the course of the year. The first weeks of school are also used for laying the foundations of the classroom including routines and expectations. Classroom routines and expectations should be introduced during these first few weeks in order for students to create habits for the rest of the year.

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Throughout The First Six Weeks of School, there are many useful artifacts. Each chapter contains a daily/weekly schedule modified for grade levels. These are one of our favorite artifacts because we will all be using them as we start our careers as educators! We attached an example of one of the schedules for reference. This is a schedule of the first day of school got grades 3-4.

Another artifact that our group loved was the discussions we when creating our first presentation for this book. One thing that kept arising in our discussions was how important routines and morning meetings are in the classroom. "Having morning meetings and routines are essential to building relationships at the beginning of the school year" (Marlinde Taylor, during discussion).

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The two overarching themes for the first six weeks of school are to establish expectations as a whole class and to form connections with each other.

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There was a lot of information in this book that we learned from and will be able to use in our future classrooms. We have seen in our placement classrooms this semester and other semesters that routines play an important part in the school day. However, by reading this book, it really showed us just how we can start these routines from the very first school day, and into the first weeks of school, something that we have not necessarily had the chance to see all of yet. We also learned how important it is to start getting the students used to these routines right away to set up for success later in the school year. The book gave us some good concrete examples of how to incorporate components of responsive classroom, such as morning meetings and closing circles, into the schedules in those first weeks of school.

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This book matched great to supplement and provide more details about how concepts we have been discussing in our 405, 406, and 407 classes fit in to those key first weeks of school. In those courses over the last several semesters, we have been learning about just how important it is to set a positive classroom environment that takes into account different students backgrounds. This book stresses the importance of setting the positive classroom environment right from the get-go. We have also spent time in classes talking about use of best practices in the classroom, and this book gives solid examples of how to incorporate these into the first weeks of school as the students are settling into the routines.

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We recommend this book to any classroom teacher! Since we haven't really had the opportunity to see a first day or first week of school yet, this book was especially helpful in visualizing the set-up of a first day. Along with learning about how the first day is set-up, we had the opportunity to learn about how different classroom routines are introduced and implemented into the classroom on the first day as well as during the first six weeks. Something that we enjoyed about this book is that each section is broken up by grade clusters. Since the first week of school will look different for a second grade classroom vs. a fifth grade classroom, the book offers different activities and goals that are grade-appropriate. We recommend this book to any educator due to the fact that the book provides specific activities with certain goals in mind. Even if a teacher has been teaching for 20 years, they could learn something about the structure of the first six weeks of school that they could want to implement into their current classroom.

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As a whole, we were impressed by how clear the book was in giving the reader directions of how to set up their classroom for the first six weeks of school. We were surprised that the author provided the reader with mock schedules to follow, and it was very reader friendly. In terms of content, it was surprising how much time needs to be spent explaining classroom materials and how to organize them etc. We never would have thought of spending as much time going over books in the class, how to use markers, etc.