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. Temple 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 was super difficult for my students.
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. Sadly, most groups didn't get past the 10x6 :(
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)
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