tweenteacher.com

I’m asked frequently about the nuts and bolts of middle school: classroom management, paperwork, first day rituals, etc…So I wanted to do a series of posts that addresses what I’m doing right now, real time. The start of the year is vital, as we all know, and setting up routines is key for tweens because they are anything but consistent in every sense of the word. They depend on your classroom routine and count on it. So set up routines you can stick to, or if you stray from them for one reason or another, can return to easily when needed.

My first day (s) of school look something like this:

1. Hand out card to determine random seating – Basically, I stand at the door to my classroom and greet kids, giving each of them a card from a standard deck. They must find the corresponding card that is taped to a desk. It gives them a little something to think about while I’m meet-and-greeting. It’s random seating on the first day, and then I get to know them and might shuffle some of them around over the course of the next week or so. Seating changes periodically (I’ll post about the need for that later). For 4th quarter, they are permitted to sit where they want with me having the final say. By then, however, we’ve built community and hopefully they are making better choices then they would have made at the beginning of the year. Besides, tween years are like dog years: for every year of growth, it counts as 7 on the non-tween, human scale. Tweens are just mutable that way.

2. Handouts that I, over the course of the first few days, go over, collect, etc...I use the following handouts:

• Welcome Letter and Homework Policy

• Publishing Agreement for online or print purposes of their face, voice, or student work

• Movie Permission Sheet – on the occasion that I want to show a movie that relates to the curriculum or clips from YouTube that are content-based, I don’t want to hand out a sheet per movie. I do one sheet at the beginning of the year that is a catch-all for all potential uses.

• Computer Survey – who has access, who does not. I don’t want to limit what I attempt during the year (blogging, Elluminate tutoring, etc…) because of the few who are still out in the cold, but I need to devise options for those who don’t typically have access.

If you want to download some of my handouts, here they are:

7th grade intro letter

Publishing Release

Video Permission Form

I always keep a folder on hand for each period that contains copies of these as well as a Reading Survey and a Writing Benchmark prompt for any student who matriculates in after the first few days. Just make the folder and assign a student in each period to hand it out to any student who walks in the door, so things function seamlessly right from the get-go as seen through the eyes of the trickling-in student.

3. Find a Fib activity - I begin to build community immediately in my classroom. Don’t worry about going over the rules. There’s still time for that. It’s more important to going over who you are, what kind of teacher you are, and what kind of expectation you have for them as individuals in your class. The Find a Fib activity begins the process of Think Aloud, begins a structured paring activity that shows already that this is a class of collaboration, and makes you “for one brief shining moment” the most interesting person in the room. And that helps with classroom management in the end.

4. Folder Creation – Eventually we will make our Works in Progress Folders and Portfolios. These will house our creations, and will be decorated with illuminated letters that use symbols that represent their contents and our curriculum.

5. Poetry, Quickwrites, Quickdraws – Don’t let the first couple of days be curriculum free. Even if you have items that are dictated by your district that must be accomplished in those critical days, if you want those tweens awake and alert, get their brain juices flowing right now. At least devote the beginning of class to establish your content, even if the rest of the time is in the hands of the set-up gods.

6. Intro to Time Management – post with pictures to come.

7. Intro to my website – I’m still putting it together, but if you want to check it out, it’s at http://web.me.com/bulldogradio.

8. Who does what in your small group – I name each spot at the small group table based on my curriculum. I’ve written about this before here. At each table, there’s a Bella, a Skullduggery, a Wart, a Prince Hal, and a Tatiana (this varies from year to year based on my memory or lack thereof.) This way, you can create fluid groupings very easily. “All Bellas, please go get your group’s writer’s notebooks.” “Could I please see all Prince Hal’s over here at this table for a conference about your latest draft.” “Only Tatiana’s may raise their hand during this next activity, so if you have a question or comment, agree as a group on its wording and Tatiana’s will represent you guys today.” And so on.

The sooner your class runs smoothly, the sooner you can get beyond the nuts and bolts and deeper into the content that you really want to share. Make sure your personality is part of the routine of the class and the students will not only obey the rules, they will want to obey them.

Good luck in the start of your school year. Check back for more tween teaching advice, and please share your own. After all, blogging’s a two-way street. I look forward to learning from you all.

So the first three days flew by, and on the justice scale of what went right vs. what went wrong, laughter and learning won out. So I thought I’d share with you a brief run-down of the highlights in a wham-bamm, thank-you-ma’am synopsis of my first few days of the school year. (more…)

The Illinois News-Gazette recently reported an increase in second career teachers.  But, really, aren’t we all second-career teachers?  I mean, unless we bopped from high school to a BA to an education program and landed directly into the teaching field, surely we “were” something else in our lives before teaching…and surely this past civilian life contributed to who we are now in the classroom. (more…)

I learned a version of this activity from Erick Gordon this summer at the UCI institute. Basically, it’s a get-to-know activity where the students get to learn a little about me and then learn a little about each other. It also becomes a very easy springboard for teaching Narrative and Memoir.

First I shared a list of 11 statements about myself. Embedded in the list is one fib. The kids read the statements out loud and then I have kids volunteer guesses as to which is the fib. They also have to justify why they feel it’s the fib.

With each one they chose that is an actual fact, I do a quick one-minute oral narrative about that fact that makes them wanting more. When they hit the fib, well, then I do a little soapbox number.

Here was my list:

1. My father is the 1969 World Champion Jeopardy player.

2. I was kicked out of Brownies in 4^th grade.

3. When I was a child, I was a model on The Price is Right.

4. When I was 14 I went to Greece and dropped my coolest pair of sunglasses into a well of frogs.

5. My dad created Capt. Jack Sparrow.

6. When I studied at Oxford University in England, I ended up having an emergency appendectomy.

7. My husband and I met in 2^nd grade.

8. I am a certified OpenWater II scuba diver who goes diving with her mom.

9. When I was in school, I was a straight A student.

10. I once worked at a guest ranch, working in the stables, leading the kiddie rides across the Arizona desert.

11. One weekend, I was so bored that I went skydiving just to do something new.

Can you guess the fib? Answer: # 9. Yes, it’s true. I was NOT a straight A student. In fact, I didn’t find a joy in learning or in school until the occasional high school class or college class when I could actual point to classes I was actually interested in.

In other words, I not only didn’t have a passion in or for school, but I also remember what I didn’t like or understand. As a teacher, my recollections add to my ability to reach out to a diversity of learners. As a teacher, my willingness to share myself, my strengths, and my foibles adds to my ability to reach them as well.

Then I had the kids develop 4 truths and a fib.  They partnered up and tried to guess each other’s fibs, giving little verbal narratives about each truth.  Afterwards, their partners had to circle the story they would like to hear more about.  We did a real quick review of sensory details and I modeled creating a bulleted list of details from one of the truths.  The one I modeled was # 11.  So here’s what I wrote:

*a free-fall out of a plane feels like you’re lying on a table.  That’s how much pressure there is on your body.

*the plan ride up was so loud, we couldn’t hear each other yell our words across the aisle.

*When you jump, the only real idea of speed you have is the fact that the plane is getting smaller so quickly.  When you level out, your hands flap, but the horizon stays the same for a long time.  Otherwise, it’s almost like a loud hovering.

*when you pull the cord to let out the parachute, you get an intense wedgie.

*my feet fell asleep which drifting down to the ground

*my mouth was open during free-fall so when I landed, my teeth felt like they were wearing socks.  They were that grimy.

Then the kids created their own bulleted list of sensory details.  It began a potential narrative, should they chose to return to this concrete description brainstorm.

Share yourself, your experiences, and the themes of your life. You are the supplemental material. Share yourself and your students will learn more.

Hope your first day went as well as my own.