First Week Reflections

In Georgia, we are well into our first month of school having gone back on July 31st and the students on August 6th. I've had quite a while to reflect on what I did the first three days (we started back on a Wednesday), and I have realized I need to come up with a new game plan for my kiddos. At the end of each school year, I always have such grand plans to spend my summer getting super organized, type up all my lesson plans (for the first time ever), and come up with awesome back to school activities for those days before the kiddos get their textbooks. What ACTUALLY happens is several bags of school books, notebooks, and other items are relegated to a corner of my home office or bedroom for at least the first month of summer. Every day I glance at the corner and tell myself that "tomorrow" I will get down to business. Right, never happens. Well, it does happen about two days before pre-planning is about to start, and the panic attacks set in as I realize that I haven't cracked open those now dusty bags all summer. But I digress.

A fellow 8th grade teacher shared her ice-breaker handout with me, and since I wasn't super excited about my brown bag activity, I eagerly took her up on the handout. It required students to get other student signatures for summer activities and hobbies that took place last summer. My students were quite receptive to it. What I realized went wrong is that they really enjoyed learning about what everyone signed off on. Sure I spent time going over some of the more interesting activities such as "Traveled off the continent" and "Likes to sew, knit, or crochet." However, next year I plan to allow kids to get into small groups and really analyze each other's responses to see what they had in common, what were their differences, and develop some new friendships. This activity is especially great for my classroom as we live in a high military area and are always getting in transfer students from other states. As we can all empathize, middle school is not the easiest place to walk in and be the "new kid" yet again. This activity definitely has the potential to offer students a sense of camaraderie, even if they only just met through allowing students to make connections and find commonalities. But none of that happened this year because it didn't occur to me to put students in groups to let them see what they had in common. So that's goal #1 for next year :)

THIS (made by Tales of Teaching in Heels) is very similar to what I did as an ice-breaker. The main difference is that my activities were in list form with lines for student signatures, but you get the idea :)