Happy New School Year!
Here in Ontario, we still have a few weeks of summer left, but I know that many friends have already begun a new school year or are gearing up to start. I used to be the teacher who handed out a syllabus AND a diagnostic on the first day of school. I was under the delusion that “setting a proper tone” meant not smiling until Christmas and ensuring kids understood that in my class, serious learning happens.
Needless to say, I have come to learn that serious learning can happen even if (or better if) you develop a positive relationship with your students instead.
A Few Ideas
When I worked at the District we had our 21C teams do the Marshmallow Challenge. They only had 18 pieces of spaghetti, a piece of string, a piece of tape, and one marshmallow to create the tallest free structure. It was a riot and I think it is a really neat way of talking about how to work together as a team. Feel free to modify this template.
I really liked some of the ideas in this post by Miss G: Why I don’t review the syllabus on the first day of school (and what I do instead). She has a few ice breakers and an Investigate the Teacher activity which I think is such a great idea. My one addition to this would be to have kids look around to make inferences but also Google me to make inferences about me based on what they see online. This also models for them what an intentional digital footprint looks like.
This video and project was shared by @JoyceBronwyn Follow the project at #OGCHopeCampaign. I LOVE the idea of beginning the school year with the provocation, What is your Hope?! I loved seeing our own students add their hopes to our board. If you are remote this year? Use a Jamboard or Padlet to collect student responses (after co-constructing norms for contributing).
Eduprotocols Smart Start by Jon Corippo, and Marlena Hebern provide a variety of fun, research based activities for any subject for the first days of school. Need more support? Check out the Smart Start course here.
Education World has volumes of icebreakers for the first few days of school. Check them out here and if you scroll all the way down in the post you will find many, many more!
My friend Tisha Richmond has had lots of success by having her kids create a few of their Favourite things (yes, hum along) with playdoh and the next day with Rice Krispie squares! Here is her post. And here is her play doh recipe. She also recently posted about a Crime Scene game which would work really well at the beginning of the school year. Check it out here.
One of my favourite posts for the first few weeks is one by George Couros called 10 Easy Ways to Create and Amazing Class Culture this Year. It has lots of simple ways to create a positive culture in your class.
What’s your favourite activity for the first few weeks of school? Would love to hear about it in the comments.
Have a fantastic year!