First Week of School – 2010

Image by Scott Ableman via Flickr

I’ve never started my year exactly the same way twice. I remember when I used to start with the chicken dance. The idea was that if we could all look silly on day 1, we wouldn’t have to stress out about looking silly the rest of the year. The chicken dance has been lost along the way but the first few days of school are critical for establishing the kind of community where my students and I will be successful in our classroom. This involves me getting to know my students and them getting to know me and each other. It also means us having an understanding of ourselves and the way we work so that we can make our needs clear. If we don’t know what we need or if we don’t communicate those needs, there is great potential for misunderstanding and conflict during the class term.

This year, I decided to explicitly start each class with a “Who am I?” mini (~ 2 weeks) unit. In this time, we did the following activities:

• play a getting to know each other bingo game
• discuss role of web2.0 tools in the classroom
• students e-mail the teacher from their most frequently checked e-mail address
• complete the Learning Styles Quiz
• complete multiple intelligences quiz and record results – http://bgfl.org/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/choose_lang.cfm
• complete the personal information form https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/nagoyais.net/viewform?authkey=CJLGheII&hl=en&formkey=dG83Q2Q5SlZlaE9xMnhRLXZNZXhiZmc6MQ#gid=0
• read the school’s acceptable policy, create scenarios and act them out
• create class norms
• create personal goals/list of needs for success
• discuss (briefly) choosing good usernames and passwords (as a class)
• create the following accounts
  • create a diigo account and join the class group
  • create a http://www.turnitin.com account
  • Create a blogging account (kidblog for grade 6 and grade 7, edmodo for grade 8, edublogs for grade 9)
  • Check login for aviary education account
• create an avatar for the blog
• write the first post of the school year
• have time to talk to each other based on interests, strengths, challenges, goals

These activities gave the class additional information about each other so that we’re real people to each other. It also gave them an opportunity to examine their meta-cognition and consider their preferences for particular types of activities/ways of learning. For many of the students, the quiz results were a validation of their knowledge of themselves. For others, it gave them an opportunity to consider how they like to learn. We also got a chance to discuss the fact that although we all have preferences for ways of learning, those are not the ONLY way(s) in which we can learn. We also discussed whether or not our preferences are the same as our strengths. Some students were interested in exploring how to improve the intelligences that they struggled with.

After going through the process for determining the school’s missions and objectives last year, I decided to use consensus for creating our class norms. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Some of the rules that the students came up with were ones that I’d never have considered but they felt that those rules had to be explicitly written for clarity and to ensure success for all members of our classroom community. Who am I to argue that? Some students also wrote their own list of needs to be successful in the class. I’m looking forward to using those reflections to conference with them when I do a check in over the next couple of weeks.

If you’re just starting school after the labour day weekend, Happy First Week of School!