Ep 67. Activities for the First Week of School

Johanna Kuiper 0:00
You ready for the beginning of the school year. If you’ve been a teacher for a while, you might already have a routine for the beginning of the school year. So whether you are new teacher, or you’re looking to revamp your first week agenda, let me share my favorite first week activities that involve teamwork, math, and a whole lot of fun. Let’s get started.

Johanna Kuiper 0:20
Welcome to solving for the undefined podcast. I’m your host, Johanna, founder of Miss Kuiper’s Classroom, the place that equips teachers and creating a healthy math classroom where students can thrive, no matter their academic abilities. But it’s not always about the numbers. And that’s why I’m here, bringing you the formulas to solve your problems, math and otherwise, plus strategies on cultivating that necessary math mindset. And that’s what you can count on.

Johanna Kuiper 0:49
Hello, hello, welcome to a brand new episode. With August right around the corner is starting to feel like back to school season. And while I don’t go back till the end of August, so many of you are going back this week, which blows my mind. July is definitely in my mind a summer month, not a prep for school month. So with all of those things in mind, I wanted to share a little bit about what I do the very first week of school to start the year off strong. And for me, the first week of school is that slow integration for students back into the classroom routine. So I want it to be fun building teamwork, and some math critical thinking skills. And honestly, it helps me with the slow integration back into the school year. It’s been like two months since I was in front of a group of students. And so this is going to allow me to slowly work my way back into being a teacher, as well as learning this new group of students. And this year, I’m going to be teaching seventh grade as well as eighth grade and my accelerated eighth class. So I’m going to have to learn a whole new demographic of students. Because as a middle school teacher, you know that seventh graders are vastly different than eighth graders. So this is going to be my opportunity to learn how to interact and engage seventh graders as well.

Johanna Kuiper 2:21
So starting from day one, here is what I do. I greet students at the door with a number for their desk. Now, this is an idea from the first days of school book by Harry Wong, it was a gift to me from my cooperating teacher. And this is something that I do every year is greet students at the door. And this is just an opportunity for me to ask them their name, give them a handshake, and learn the pronunciation of their name as well, because that is so important that we learn how to say our students names as well. So I’m getting my students at the door, learning their name, and I’m giving them a number for their desk. So I have all of my desks labeled, and I have them go sit in that group for the day. And that is just kind of our first introduction into the randomize groups that I’m going to be using throughout the school year. Then once all of my students are in the classroom, the first activity that we do together is named tents. And I have a very specific template that I use for named tents. So the front of it, they get to design with their name. And then they have to draw a picture using the first letter of their name. So for example, if I were to make one using my first name, Johanna, I would draw jelly beans. And that way, it’s just a phonetic way of like remembering how you start my name. And then on the back of the name tent, I have like four quadrants. And in each quadrant, they’re given a different prompt. And they’re allowed to write out using a sentence frame that I have, do like bullet points or draw pictures. And the four quadrants are hobbies, favorite foods, goals after high school and their feelings about math. And I really liked that last one, because it gives me an insight into where my students are in terms of their mindset regarding math. And then my favorite piece of the name tense is actually on the inside. So on the inside, I do five days of communication. And so it’s like two rows of five boxes. And in that top box students are responding to a prompt at the end of class. And I will go through and respond to every single one. So at the end of the class period, after they do their prompt, they turn in their name 10 And I go through and respond to every single one and sometimes is just like a awesome, thank you for sharing or it’s nice to meet you. And sometimes it can be a little bit more depending on what they shared. And it’s just an opportunity for me Wow, very time intensive to show that I’m listening and that I care and that I’m willing to take the time to respond to you. And it’s been a really cool, powerful thing that I do. And I got the idea from someone on Instagram or Tik Tok. And I can’t remember who so if it was you, thank you so much you have inspired me to do this every single year. So now that I’ve greeted students, they’re out their desks we’ve done or filled out the name tents, the front and the back. I now do kind of a GET TO KNOW YOU activity. And it’s not an icebreaker, I think I said this in last year’s beginning of the school year episode of icebreakers are just anxiety inducing activities. So this gets Noemi activity is just in their group. So I do everything in groups of three, like students are sitting in their groups of three. And this is where I do this activity. And it’s called A to Z get to know me. And I really liked this because students are getting to use their names as part of the activity. So for every letter in their name, they’re going to answer a question. So for example, my name Johanna starts with J. So I’d answer the J question, which is just a, you know, my least favorite snack is blink. But my favorite is blink. And I’d fill in those blanks and share that with my team. And then the person on my left would use the first letter of their name to answer another question. And then we just continue to go around until all of our letters were used, or the time that the teacher aka me has set aside for this activity has ended. And there’s some really cool questions on here that are, like funny, or serious or about math itself. So some of my favorites are Queen of England grants, you knighthood. What did you do to earn it? For G: give an example of your favorite way to eat a potato? Or F, fast forward 10 years from now? What does your life look like? So there are a variety of like, get to know you in how you like to eat potatoes. And what do you envision for the future? Or how are you feeling about the school year? All of those questions are uncommitted encompassed in this activity. And it’s really fun to see students answer funny, weird questions together. Then after the A to Z get to know me time is done, I introduced what’s called a community circle. So community circle is where all of you are sitting in one row in a circle facing each other. And the important piece about a community circle is that everyone is facing each other. There is no one row and then a second row behind them. It’s one singular row around the classroom where everyone is sitting and facing each other. And you could do it standing, but people tend to be more relaxed when they’re sitting. So I like to do it sitting and everyone participates. So I like to say participation is not optional, but there are options for how we participate. And by participating in a community circle, we’re building connections not only between us as teachers with our students, but we’re building that student to student relationship as well. And that’s so important. Because in order for students to be willing to try new things, especially as they’re learning new concepts, they have to feel like they can trust people, and that they’re safe enough to make mistakes in the classroom. And that only happens when students feel safe with each other in the room. So we need to be cultivating and building those relationships between students. So students feel like they can learn math at whatever level they are at.

Johanna Kuiper 9:02
So in the community circle, the very first day, at the end of class, I have everyone go around and introduce themselves like Hi, my name is blank. And then the next person will be like, Hi, so and so my name is blank. And it’s an opportunity again for students to learn each other’s names, and share their own. And then I have us go around again sharing one question from the ADC get to know me. Then the last thing we do is we go back to our desks and students fill out the name tent prompt. And the question I usually pose the very first day is how do you pronounce your name? And then what pronouns do you use mer use them in front of other students or your family, and then anything else that the student wants me to know. And then that’s day one. Day one is done in the books. And then I just got to repeat that four more times for all of my class periods. And then the rest of the days of the first week of school we typically have three so that’d be day One. So day two and day three, follow the same formula of greeting students at the door doing an activity ending in a community circle and a name tent prompt. And I’m going to share with you what I do day two, and what I do T three specifically. So day two, students are going to walk in to find their random group assignment. So day one, I handed them a card that told them what group number they were going to be. Today, I’m starting to introduce the idea of using the random group generator from picker wheel to assign them their groups. So when they walk in, I’ll explain it and have them sit inside their groups. Once everyone is inside, I’ll explain that this is how we are going to be doing our random groups, every single day, you’ll come in, your name will be inside of a group, that is where you will sit.

Johanna Kuiper 10:56
And if you want more information about how and why I do random groups, if you go back and listen to episode 32, I did an entire episode on the ideal way to group students in your classroom. So you can go check that out.

Johanna Kuiper 11:12
One of my goals for day two is to start introducing the routines that students will be using throughout the school year. So because I do a lot of things inside of teams, I want to make sure students have a an example of what good team work looks like. So after the class begins, we’ve done our introductions, we watch a couple of videos on what teams look like. And there’s really one really cool one from the army that have them scaling over a wall together. And that’s a really cool video to watch, because each person plays a role and helping everyone get to the other side of the wall. And then there are other ones that you can watch as well, you can just Google them. And after we watch those videos, I have students reflect on them and come up with three things of what good teamwork looks like. And three things of what good teamwork does not look like. And then we talk about them as a full class.

Johanna Kuiper 12:12
From there, we’re going to do an activity inside of their groups that requires teamwork. And that activity is the 100 numbers to get students talking by Sara Vander worth. And I love this activity because students literally have to work together, in order to figure out the pattern and to reach 102. It’s a 30 to 45 minute activity. So if you have class periods around 50 to an hour long, this is the perfect activity that will take an entire class period. And it’s great. I’m not going to go into depth and what the activity itself is because Sarah has a really in depth blog post about it. But I will tell you one thing, if you’ve done this activity before, or you teach like a seventh grade and an eighth grade and want to do the activity every year, she’s found or created a second version of it that has a different pattern on the paper. So students aren’t going to be able to go into from seventh grade into your eighth grade class knowing how to already do this activity. So keep that in mind. If you want to use this there are multiple different pattern papers that you can use, which I think is super cool. All of the links for the resources that we talked about today, are going to link down below in the description as well as the show notes on my website. So that way, you can easily find everything that we talked about today.

Johanna Kuiper 13:45
Once the 100 numbers to get students talking is over the class period is also almost over. So then I do a quick community circle kind of discuss what they saw that their teams did well. And then we move into the name tent prompt. And I think my second day prompt is usually something along the lines of how do you feel about math? What activities are you involved in? Or draw a picture or sketch of blank? And that way, it’s just kind of students can choose which question they want to answer. And it can be either in a drawing form or in a writing out something that way it kind of caters to all of my students. And that’s the end of day two.

Johanna Kuiper 14:30
So now moving into day three, the goal again for day three is just to kind of solidify some of the routines that we’re doing, as well as introducing a little bit of new routines. So students again are gonna walk in, see their name in a random group on the screen and go sit in that group. Then after we do introductions, I’m going to introduce the activity for today and this is actually new for me this year, I’ve changed up what I’m going to be doing And I’m excited about it.

Johanna Kuiper 15:01
I found this on Instagram, someone shared it. And it’s called soup, salad or sandwich. And just overall, the way it works is you give students a picture of a food. And they have to discuss if it’s a soup, salad or sandwich. And there’s a couple of variations where you can have students pick a food. And then as a class you discuss if it’s a soup, salad or sandwich, but I kind of like having a slide deck of already picked foods, and the students decide if it’s a soup, salad or sandwich.

Johanna Kuiper 15:34
So here’s how I’m going to be using it. So if you took the molding mathematicians challenge in July, the beginning of July, we discussed one of the days about using roles to increase participation. And so this is the day where I’m going to be introducing the roles to my students, and I’m modifying them a little bit to fit the activity a little bit better. So the roles that I’m going to be using for my groups of three, our reader, writer, Ambassador and Supply Manager, so I’m going to introduce these roles to the my students, they’re gonna get 30 seconds to decide who’s going to be which role for that activity. And then I’m going to show them how they’re going to complete that role. The supply manager is going to get the mini whiteboard and whiteboard marker, the reader writer is going to read the food item on the screen, and then write down if the if the group has discussed it to be a soup salad or sandwich. And then the ambassador is going to share why they chose it to be that way with the rest of the class. And those are the three roles I’m going to be using for this activity.

Johanna Kuiper 16:43
You could also do this as like a four or I guess, three corner activity. If you wanted to have students up and moving because movement is so important within the classroom, you could do it that way instead, then I think that this activity will take a while, especially since I’m introducing some new ideas of like, the team roles a supply manager, etc. So I think this will take the majority of a class period, especially since I have multiple foods, like a lot of foods for us to talk about. So I think after this activity, I’m just going to end with a community circle, maybe it’ll take longer than the other couple of days. And then end with the name tent prompt. And the name tent prompt that I use for day three is, what are some things that bug you and what inspires you. And that way, I can kind of just get a little bit more insight into who the student is. And as I’m saying this, I realized I didn’t tell you that I pass back the name tense every single day. So like I said, at the beginning of the episode, I’m responding to each of the prompts that my students gives. And then I’m passing back the name tense at the beginning of the class period. So sometimes if I have like a prep before the class period, and I have already generated the random groups, I will put the stacks of named tents on that group. But sometimes if I have classes back to back, I don’t have that luxury. So I’ll pass them back. As we’re watching the team video, or they’re starting to do their activity, that’s when I’ll take the time to pass them back. So that way students can read what I responded to them

Johanna Kuiper 18:30
and have it for the name tent prompt portion. And then that’s day three. So I know some of you start on a Tuesday for the beginning of the school year and have four days. So if you need a four day, you can just find another team building activity. So for the day three, we did this soup solder sandwich and the day before we did the 100 numbers to get students talking. And day one, we did the A to Z get to know me. So find another team building activity, there’s a lot of them, you can just Google team building activities. And then enter the community circle and do the name tent prompt. So if you download the name tent for me, there are five days so you can use all five of them if you want, or just use it the first week of school, it’s up to you. And boom, just like that your first week of school is done. If you are part of chaos to community, you actually have the two week implementation guide for the beginning of the school year that has all of these listed out as well as links for all of it, if not most of it. And if anything’s missing, just email me and let me know and I will add it so that way you have access to everything that I talked about in the episode. And if you’re not part of chaos, a community and you want to learn more about how to build community in your classroom to boost student success, or how to start off your school year strong. I invite you to join us in chaos to community it’s mini course, that is going to help you build that community learn how to use community circles using teams. And it gives you I have directories of team building activities, community building activities, thinking tasks, as well as that two week implementation guide that shows you step by step what I do the first two weeks of school. So this episode gave you an insight into what I do the first four days of school, but this has what I do the first 10 days of school. So if you want that it’s inside of chaos to community. I will link it down in the description as well as the show notes on my website. And when you have questions about today’s episode, or anything else about engaging your students academically to help them deeply understand and love math, feel free to email me Johanna at Miss Kuiper’s classroom.com or send me a message on Instagram at Miss Kuiper m i s SKUIPR. I’m happy to answer any and all questions you have. And with that, Oh calc-u-later Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. To find all the links and resources to things talked about in this episode, head on over to Miss Kuiper’s classroom.com and click on podcast

Transcribed by https://otter.ai