While teaching, I found one of the best forms of professional development is sharing ideas with other teachers. You can attend conference after conference about curriculum and teaching strategies, but in order to effectively reach the students with those strategies, you have to have a good foundation and rapport in the classroom. Using Pinterest, reading blogs, and scrolling through Instagram was the way that I found most of the ideas I had to set the foundation of my classroom. Since I spent so much time gathering ideas, I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorites. Over the next couple of posts, I am going to focus on back to school activities that I loved doing, classroom organization that I found useful, and some other classroom ideas I think are worth sharing as every one gears up for back to school.
First Up: Introducing yourself and getting to know your students.
At the start of each school year, you have a fresh batch of students who don’t know and who you don’t know yet! The first few days and weeks are so important in getting to know them and setting up an environment where they feel comfortable. I always started on the first day with activities that were about them and shared things about me. My favorite activity to do to help the students get to know me was for them to tell me about myself! I put up a Powerpoint slide with pictures all about me.
I tell students the slide is all about me and they have to use what they see to tell the class about me. I have them raise their hands and say the fact about me and why they decided it was something that described me. I then explain it in a little more detail.
After we finish learning about me, I ask each student to pick one thing about themselves they would definitely pick to put on a collage about themselves. I then go around and ask each student individually to tell me their name and the one important thing about them. This helps me immediately get something to relate to with each student and allows them to get to know each other too.
If you are looking for a get to know you activity for students to do, you can have them make their own collage. They can draw things, use pictures from home, or cut items out of magazines. Another spin on it is the bag activity where students put a few items in a bag that represent them and then share their items with the class.
There are so many different activities to get to know your students, but I feel like it is more important for them to get to know you over the first couple of days. Starting off by not standing in front of them lecturing about yourself, but instead having them describe you lets them open up and really own the knowledge they are gaining about you. Having them get to know you and build a relationship with you is the first step in building the rapport necessary to have a smooth running classroom.
Soaring Bird Mathematics 