The first day of school is Freshman only and filled with opportunities for them to learn about teachers, building policies, and schedules. It was a fun day for everyone!
We started our first regular class day with with team building activities. In Algebra we did the Cup Stacking Challenge. The TVs worked well to project each challenge as the students were working through them. I modified the challenge a bit, as I set a timer for each challenge (I varied the time limit for each one) and had every team complete them one at a time. The activity went well and students really seemed to enjoy it!
I discovered right away that I needed to adjust how I set up the projecting in my classroom. I had the projector displaying the same thing that was on the student TV screens but I wanted to be able to display a timer instead. I ended up connecting my iPad to one of the HDMI ports on the projector. It isn’t ideal (there is a cord hanging down from my projector) but I left it there and it will work for now. I am not sure yet if I want to order a long HDMI cable (to run through the ceiling to my desk) or a separate AppleTV or maybe just a another VGA to display what is on my computer. I think I’ll give it a bit of time to see what my needs are and then decide. I also decided that it would be great if my switch from PC to AppleTV had a remote control!
In Algebra Resource we completed the Marshmallow Challenge. This challenge involved building a freestanding spaghetti tower with a full size marshmallow at the top. Students found this more challenging than they first anticipated but were able to work through the challenge.
I hand out Name Tents with a feedback form on the first day of class. I got the idea from Sara VanDerWerf (check out her blog here.) Students write their name on the outside of the tents. The inside has a section for them to write something to me each day. They can ask a question or tell me something about themselves or even draw me a picture. I spend hours each day replying to every comment/question/picture. I found that is worth putting in the time to get to know my students. Some students really love writing back and forth every day and others struggle to write anything.
We use CPM at our school. This means our class time is spent working in teams. With my new arrangement I had to add two new roles, this meant that the placemats I used in the past (with only 4 roles) didn’t work this year. I was trying to figure out how I was going to set up my teams when I remembered Paul Jorgens, another Desmos Fellow, told about his random grouping strategy. He referred me to an article about it (which can be found here.) and I decided that I would give it a try.
I made cards and randomly group my students every day as they walk into class. I am not sure yet if I am going to continue to do it everyday, but so far it seems to be working well. I am hoping that students will learn each others names faster and get to know each other a little bit better. I have five teams, so the numbers represent the table/team number. In addition to the number, I put a team role on each card. Students take on the role on the card each day. Word was acting strangely when I made the cards, so I ended up having to make each table set one at a time and saving them as .pdf files, then changing the team number and repeating. I have attached both the Word and .pdf file.
