First Days of School

 There are just not enough hours per day in August to get everything done!  I either need longer days or the ability to go with less sleep :)  

There are a lot of things I like about my school and a few things that I don't, and the Back to School week falls under both of those categories!  We report to school on Monday / Tuesday, off on Wednesday, and kids come on Thursday.  I love that day off to get things done (like a pedi with my mom), but with all of the required meetings, it feels like there is so much to do in a very condensed amount of time.

But Thursday came and so did the kids, whether I was ready or not...

On the first day, we do...

• Posters around the room
• Name Tents
• And Math of course!

You can see some of the posters in the photo and on each table is a small container with some post-its.  They answer the 6 prompts and go around the room putting their answers on the board.  The 6 prompts are:

• A goal I have this year is...
• Our classroom should be ____ every day
• I learn best when...
• Mrs. __ can help me best by...
• Math is important because...
• To be successful in math this year, I need...

This activity infuses a bit of color as well as gets the kids up and moving around from day 1.  

After that, we work on their Name Tents, which has been written about quite a bit in the MTBoS, so my only change is that I don't print the form on the inside - I just have the kids draw a line down the crease and then two perpendicular to that to create 6 spaces for writing.  This was the first year (ever?) that everyone folded their name tent correctly!!!  (YAY!)

Finally, it's time to do Math!  This year, I tried a new-to-me activity using pentominos because I wanted to do something Geometric.  While I liked the activity, I found that it more challenging than I expected.  

The original task asked the students to use all of the pentominos to build a 10x6 rectangle, then to try again to build a 12x5, then again for a 15x4.  Next year, I think I'm going to work on some better scaffolding for this as the 10x6 was tricker than expected!

Thankfully, it did allow us to talk about Productive Struggle,  the importance of persevering, and why I like to use manipulatives a lot to test out theories.

So for next year, I think I would modify it using one of these two resources:

• Better scaffolding of the tasks, similar to the challenges shared here by Sarah Carter
• Using these puzzles by MathsKo

That pretty much ended Day 1, and I was happy to celebrate the day with a mini-bundtlet from Nothing Bundt Cakes that was delivered by our Student Leadership group!

Then, on to Day 2.  My goal with Day 2 was to introduce students to some of the structures we would be using this year...

• Open Middle - Using the digits 1 to 9, find the sum of 3 digit numbers that comes closest to 1000.
• Whiteboards - Using "The Answers Are" task from Building Thinking Classrooms
• Setting our Group Norms (see previous post)

All in all, it was a GREAT couple of days of non-curricular tasks, but then it was on to an insanely busy weekend to prepare for Week 2.