First Week Activities

I am always very curious as to how each teacher starts off the year with their students.  What procedures do they teach? How do they set up their room?  What is the first activity they have students complete?   Each of these things sets the tone of your classroom for the year.  The importance of these first few days is immeasurable.  This year is the first in my career where I will start off the year with a core classroom on the first day of school (in fact I have two core groups this year).  So far I have come up with four activities I want my students to complete that first week of school.

1. I want them to fill out a very brief questionnaire.  It gets the most basic information about them and their access to technology.  [As an aside, none of my first week activities involve tech because I have limited access to it and I want to see what kinds of tech the kids have before making grandiose plans]

2. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...C'est moi!  Is an activity to let me know about some of their likes and interests. 

 

3. Personal pennant is an open ended activity where students create a pennant that represents themselves.  It has to include their name, age and a small photo/picture of themselves.  Otherwise they can put whatever they want on them.  Student's pennants will be put up around the room to create a sense of community. 

4. The game two truths and a lie inspired this activity.  I was looking for a fun way to collect a writing sample from the students right away this year, so I came up with this post card game.  Students will create two postcards. One with something they did this summer and one with something they wish they had done this summer.  The goal is to stump the other students when they present their postcards later in the week. Each student will have a sheet to keep track of their guesses on.  The student that stumps the most people will win a small prize at the end of the activity.   

So there you have it!  Those are the four activities we'll get started on during the first week of classes this year.  What activities do you have students complete that first week?

Mme Jones

Early Classroom Setup!

I know. I know. We JUST started our holidays 2 weeks ago!  But with my other half being out of town and my entire program being moved to a new school, I felt the need to be there to ensure that all my stuff got moved over and to play around with the layout before my classroom floors get buffed over the holidays.  I am so glad I went early!  I was in about a week before all the textbooks and things we were bringing with us were to be delivered.  This is what I walked into:

The room was pretty much packed up and ready for me to take over but it simply was not my style.  I spent half a day in there just reconfiguring these desks into a layout I liked. (I hate scratching up the new floors so I always do this before if possible)  I knew that I wanted them grouped as opposed to in rows but was unsure of what size of groups to make.  In the end, you'll see I went with 4 large groups (2 of six and 2 of 8)  This classroom is very small and I wanted to make it feel like we had room to move around so in the end I put the groups off to the sides of the room.

After sorting out my desk arrangement and looking around for supplies.  I made a list and headed to the fabric store.  The bulletin boards were in pretty bad shape and I wanted to breath new life back into them.  I decided that simple black fabric would due the trick.  First I pinned the fabric up and then went along stapling it as I pulled the fabric tight.  Once the fabric was on the main bulletin board.  I was left trying to come up with way to hide the water damaged cork board above the windows.

I eventually found some old black bristol board and put it up there to cover it up.  My plan is to have all my students bring in family photos that we will put up above the windows to personalize the space.  The cork boards are much to high for me to be putting things up there on a regular basis.

Due to the very small size of the room, I decided that I would keep the decor very simple and streamlined. My hope was that by make the room look cohesive it would give the impression of a larger room.  Take a look at what I ended up with before I left the other day.

This is the view from my desk.  On the bulletin board is our CAFE menu and the Boggle game which students enjoy when they have a minute between activities.  The two large totes will have hanging folders for each of my students.  I will hand back work into their files and when they miss a day, I can simply add the work they missed directly into their folders.

As you can see this is my small desk area, behind that little door is the smallest closet.  It is the only storage in this entire classroom other then the shelves in the previous pictures.  Beside my desk there is a penent flag that says: Objectifs.  I will list each classes learning objectives for the day/week depending on what we are doing.

Since I have more chalk board then I need I decided to put my word wall up on one of them.  I believe it will make it easier to add and remove words as we work through various units of study this year.  Directly beside the door I have my message centre.  I have two core classes this year, each of them has a separate homework calendar to help them keep on top of things.

The last thing I added was a pennant banner which goes from one end of the room to the other.  I am certain I will make other adjustments to the room before September but I feel like there is not much room to add more things and I really like the simplicity of the space.

Hope you enjoyed the early tour of my room!

Mme Jones