My Favorite Friday #4

So the first week of school is done. :) We had meetings and prep time on Monday-Wednesday, then kiddos arrived yesterday. I have to say that one of things that I do love about my district is that they minimize the meetings. We had meetings on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, but the rest of the time was for us to work in our rooms. Then Thursday came... OH MY GOSH! My kiddos were great and we had a lot of fun, but wowzers, I was exhausted by the end of the day! Every year, I forget how much my feet hurt after being on my feet (and wearing shoes!) for an entire day. So I came home and promptly fell into bed for a 3 hour nap. :) But, now it's Friday, the first week is under our belts and we have 35 more to go :)

Now that school is in session, you will see a change to the #MyFavFriday posts. During the summer, I have time to troll Twitter looking for the hashtag, but during the year, I don't. So, if you would please take the time to fill out this Google form with your post information, it will allow me to update the archive MUCH quicker that adding each of your links by hand.

Click HERE to submit your #MyFavFriday post!

Click HERE to submit your #MyFavFriday post!

My favorite thing that I'm sharing this week is an activity that I am doing today in my Algebra 2 classes. Yesterday, on day 1, we did some getting to know you activities. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of icebreakers, but our school is so large that you literally could be in a class and not know a single person in that class. The students learned right away that they will have to talk to the people around them. We did a 4-way Venn Diagram and the kids then learned what they had in common and what was unique to them. (Idea totally stolen from some of my awesome colleagues!)

Then we started doing some "Graphing Stories" from Dan Meyer's blog. The kids really got into this and I will definitely use it again next year! Tomorrow we will do some more of his videos, and follow up with this Card Match.

Card Match is one of my favorite go-to activities. You can use this with about any subject that you need to match a question with an answer. In this Card Match, students will match a scenerio with a graph. The reason I love doing Card Match activities is that almost every student is willing to try. Since the answers are there in front of them, some of the anxiety of the "right answer" is reduced. Once the group feels like they are on target, they call me over to check. I tell them how many of the matches they have right, but I don't usually tell them which pairs are correct. Activities like this are also great for encouraging verbal communication within their groups. I love eavesdropping on their discussions :)

Happy Friday to all! :)

What is YOUR #MyFavFriday?
Click HERE to submit your post

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