Building Community is one the absolute most important concepts one must employ in order to have a successful school year. It must also be done starting on Day 1. Students need to know that you care, that they opinions are valued, and that you will treat them like humans. Students will only take risks when they are comfortable with you and the classroom environment.
That is why I will do practically no math on Day 1 of each of my classes. We will do various activities to help facilitate the growing of a community. Here is my plan.
Remind- Students will sign up to receive weekly remind texts from me and gain the ability to chat with me via texting.
Answer Garden- I have a question asking students to give me their first reactions to when they hear "math class."
Google Survey- Students will answer 10 questions about themselves in a google form. I am going to use this survey to make Kahoots about the students so that everyone gets to know their classmates.
Learning Style Survey- Students are going to visit a site and answer questions about learning styles, and will then post their results into a padlet that I created.
Kahoot - The class will play a kahoot that will be mostly about me, my family, my hobbies, and what a flipped classroom really is.
Socrative Space Race- Students will join pairs and compete in Socrative Space Race using 10 Algebra 1 Review Questions. (Can't share this because I don't know how.)
Blog- Students are going to blog in the LMS answering the following prompt "I wish my teacher knew...". They may write about anything.
While these activities are going on, I will be distributing graphing calculators and note packets. This will be the only day I had anything out. The students will be responsible for their group material after this day.
Possible issues may involve getting the really shy student to participate or joining the vast age differences 12-17. I will be anticipating these and will be able to help each of these situations.
I want my students to go home on that first day and tell their parents that I really wants to get to know them and that I care.
For Socrative - in the edit mode there is a code that looks like SOC-XXXXX. It will allow others to import your quiz from the import option under manage quizzes. (I had to tweet @Scorative to figure this out)
ReplyDeleteThanks. I did know to do that if I wanted to share a code, but didn't realize I could do it to post to my blog. #alwayslearning
DeleteI love this idea of using the survey to create Kahoots to let the class get to know each other. This sounds like something that is way less "singling out" for intros than say making students stand up and introduce each other (which for an introvert is like torture). I will have to keep this in mind for the future and tweak my existing survey/intro week
ReplyDeleteAlso love the idea of doing a kahoot about the teacher! Maybe this is what I will do instead of the review-esk ones I had planned!
Thanks for sharing, Shai!
Thanks, Heather, for commenting. I did a couple of Kahoots with the information I gathered from the kids on their survey. It was really cool to watch the kids shine explaining that particular event.
DeleteFor example, the first question on my 10 question survey asked what was the most adventurous thing the child had done. So, I took the answers, made questions, and made 4 different options. After each question, I had the student explain about their trip. It made each child shine. Also, I had one student answer inappropriately, so I didn't use his information, and he didn't get to talk about anything. Afterwards, he did approach me and told me that he realized now that he had made a mistake and apologized for not taking it seriously. There is always learning in everything.