#inspire180days: Part 1: Are You Ready for the BEGINNING OF THE YEAR?

Raise your hand if you are ready to start your first week of school? If you are not then by the time you leave this blog you will be! I plan to give you lots of great ideas to begin your first week of school that will include stories, get to know you activities, and lots of team building.

How important is it to set up a culture of safety, kindness, friendship, and credibility? It's important right but how important?

John Hattie who wrote Visible Learning suggests teacher credibility is a 0.90 effect size, classroom discussion is 0.82, and teacher-student relationships is a 0.72 effect size. What do those numbers mean? It means you would show over a years growth if you implement these influences into your classroom. Love me some data! I'm such a teacher nerd when it comes to research and best practices!

I always start my new year by teaching the children how to sit in a rainbow (semi-circle). I want my class to feel like a family and to be able to see each other when speaking. I feel that when we sit on the floor together we can see each other, it builds relationships, and a closeness to make everyone feel comfortable to speak and engage in learning. After I have taught them how to sit on the floor I teach them about purposeful and accountable talk.

Purposeful Talk:
While you are working on opening the lines of communication with your students and them learning to talk to each other it is a great time to teach and practice purposeful and accountable talk in your classroom. Purposeful talk is a focused, collaborative talk meant to deepen and extend our thinking about a topic. Life in 4B has an awesome example of how she begins this process before applying it to a text. I also teach my students to SLANT while they sit in a rainbow. SLANT= Sit Up Lean & Listen Ask Questions Nod your head Track the Speaker

Accountable Talk:
Students in accountable talk ask one another about their thinking and build on the responses of others. I start the year with sentence stems posted on the walls in the rainbow area and pictures of students using accountable talk. The Teacher Toolkit has printable stems, videos, and ways to practice.

Next, it is time to implement all the fun activities and get talking.

1. Discussion Games:

This or That is a game to get students up and moving and seeing what everyone likes or dislikes. You would come up with a list of items before hand and ask your class this or that. Then they move from one side of the classroom or to the other side.

Example: cheeseburgers or pizza and they move to the side they like the most

Jenga Talk is a great way to get the discussions flowing. Students will be broken up into groups. Next, they will use colored blocks to answer questions that go with the color. The questions included in this game are all "get to know you questions" and some fun silly questions too.

Who loves candy? Candy always helps to ease nerves and your students sure do love some candy! I love these and it's a fun way to end your day!

Here is another great idea from 4 The Love of Teaching. Write questions on the ball and pass it around for your students to answer.

One of my favorites is the yarn game or spider web activity. You can play with question cards where they throw the ball of yarn to someone and they ask a question. Another version could be that they tell one favorite thing about school or they can say something they like and then toss it to a friend that likes the same thing. At the end, your class will have made a spider web. You could then place a balloon on it and the class has to try and keep the balloon from touching the floor. Finally, you can discuss how everyone in the class is connected and that we each have a part in the classroom and it takes all of us to have a successful year.

Another great way to get to know your students all year long is using Miss5ths whiteboard prompts. If you don't follow her on Instagram you need to find her. She places quotes or prompts on her whiteboard and has her students respond. I loved the idea of starting our day on a great note. I placed her prompts each morning on a Prezi or I would just type them into a Word document and project it onto my board. My students knew that when they walked in the first thing to do was to read the board and respond by placing a post it note onto the whiteboard. They loved hearing everyone else's responses and it started our day on a happy note.

As you have had these conversations to make connections with your students jot down things that each student has said and make a Kahoot game about your class. Students will have to remember who said what to identify the correct student. This is a fun way to remind everyone of each other's lives, likes, dislikes, favorites, how they are feeling, what bums them out and so on.

2. Scavenger Hunts:

There are two types of scavenger hunts to do at the beginning of the year. The first type is to help the children find items in the room. You can make your own to fit your classroom. Here is an example of what I use.

The second type is to get to know your classmates. Again you can make your own to fit your student demographics. Here are a couple different examples that I use.

Find a Friend Bingo

Get to Know You

3. Stories:

There are so many stories out there that help in building relationships and helping to get to know your students and their feelings. I use these books to help with discussions on how we are a family, how we are all different, and to learn more about my student's feelings and thoughts.
Here are a few of my favorites I like to use: