First Week Fun

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Well, my classroom has been cleaned, rearranged and decorated!  I just have the finishing touches to add like name tags on desks, numbers on writing folders, and hooking up my Smart Board.  What a crazy couple of weeks it has been getting ready for school.  This is my 22nd time opening up my classroom for the start of the school year, and I still forget how much time it takes to make my learning environment just right for the students.

I can hardly wait to see my students who will be returning to my classroom as third graders, as well as meet my new third-grader students.

Building a classroom community, as you all know, is critical to having an effective, pleasant, and successful year.  So, I thought I'd share a few of the ways I plan to help my students get acquainted or reacquainted with one another during our first few days of school.

I found a great poem on the "Sunny Days In Second Grade" blog that I thought I would use this year as a little "Meet the Teacher" gift for my third graders.  This sweet, little poem can also be found on teacherspayteachers. It is called Ready Confetti.  I retyped the poem on fancy paper and stapled a jewelry bag filled with sequins to it.  I will have this on their desks during Meet the Teacher on Tuesday, so they can take it home and hopefully have a peaceful night's sleep.

Notice my typo!  I now need to change Sunday to Tuesday.  Always making more work for myself.  :)

I'm going to use Steve Spangler's Energy Sticks for our first team building activity.  It was one of the cool activities I engaged in when I was at his Science in the Rockies retreat this past July.  I plan to hand out an energy stick to each group of four students.  I'm going to ask them to figure out how the energy stick works.  Then I will encourage them to begin asking new questions about it, such as... Can two groups make one energy stick work?  Can three?  Can we make two or three energy sticks work at the same time?  How can we stop the energy sticks from working?

After we've exhausted and tested our questions, I will connect this activity to how our classroom community works.  I will remind them that the energy stick lit up and buzzed and worked effectively when everyone was connected.  It was fun to watch and be a part of.  When just one person stopped touching the energy stick it stopped working.  This is how our classroom works.  When everyone participates and is involved in our discussions and work we have fun, we work better, and we learn more.  When even one person stops working, for whatever reason, we don't have as much fun, our work is not better, and we are not learning as much.  In the coming days this activity will be a spring board for making our classroom rules, talking about how we treat one another, becoming mindful of our behavior, and just helping us create a caring, safe environment.

The second team-building activity I plan to have my students do also comes from the science retreat.  I'm going to use Wind Bags from SteveSpangler Science.  I'm going to let my students try to discover how to blow up the wind bags--there's a trick to doing so.  Then, after each student has had a chance to blow one up and tie it off they will separate into 2 groups.  Each group will be charged with the task of making the highest, free-standing structure possible.  The key will be to work together and cooperate.  When we teachers did this at the retreat it was so much fun not only to make the structure, but to see the creative ways other groups made theirs.  In addition to working together, this activity will allow students to get ideas from the other group and realize we can learn from each other.  Hopefully this lesson will transfer to other lessons and group work throughout the year.

The wind bags are a Sick Science activity, which means you can watch a video showing how to blow up the bags.

After attending Kristina Smekens' Literacy Retreat in June, I've been intrigued by students recomposing their knowledge in a variety of formats.  So after reading two articles on infographics that came across my blog feed, I knew I wanted my students create one right away.  These visual creations look easier to make than they are.  The creator must think about the information she wants to convey to the reader and then decide how to do so in a visual way.  Color, shape, spacing, size, and design are all very important to the finished product.  I thought a great, non-threatening introduction to infographics would be to have my kids view student-examples of infographics, and then create their own 3-D clay infographic depicting their summers. This is a brand-new activity for me so I will let you know how it goes.

I tried to make a flow chart with my favorite activity being the largest to my fourth favorite being much smaller.
This is supposed to show my time in Colorado, seeing a friend I haven't seen since high school, dog sitting, and running and reading.

Hopefully these activities will be a hit with my students.  I'll let you know next weekend.  We start school on Wednesday.  Have a great start to the school year.

Kim and Anne