Teacher Teacher: Meeting my new class

Hello again! It is getting to that back to school time and even though I’m supposed to be on holidays I have started work! I’m sure I’m not the only teacher.

I am starting at a new school in 2015 and was lucky enough to meet my new class in the last week of school. We had just under an hour of getting to know each other, which went too quick!

I have grade 1 next year. They were as excited as me and were a very chatty bunch! Not like last year.

I will be Mrs Wilkes this year not Mrs Hayley and I think it will take me awhile to get used to my name!

Of course I over planned for the hour and had too much to do but now I’ll save some of the activities for the first day. The activities we did can also be used on the first day or week of school. A lot of ideas were found on Pinterest (where else)!

Here is a look at what we squeezed in.

Getting to know you ball

1. After lining up we walked to out new class

2. We sat on the carpet and I introduced myself then we went around the circle saying our names

3. My ‘All about me’ power point with photos couldn’t be played as I did not have my new teacher laptop yet! I’ll save that one for the first day

4. Getting to know you beach ball was thrown around the circle. When the students caught it they had to read the first word they could see “looking at them” to tell us about them. Words I wrote were: family, colour, sport, school, movie, I like, pet etc. Most of the kids loved this and we made sure everyone had a turn. It was a bit long for some of the wriggly ones! I’d plan for at least 20 minutes.

5. Eyes Shut Self portraits. This was fun! I modeled my portrait first and the kids had such a giggle at my drawing. Then they went to a desk, wrote their name, closed their eyes and drew themselves on the left side of the page. They opened their eyes and looked at the silly drawings then drew their real portrait with eyes open on the right side. Of course their were some kids who ‘cheated’ and peeked to make their drawing perfect but others followed instructions and had fun squishing eyes closed or covering their eyes with their hand. We were going to colour these drawings but time ran out. I am deciding whether to colour them on the first day or to hang them up and leave them in pencil.

6. Aaargh! Time went so fast. Just as they were leaving I took a quick photo of each child so that I could make a display for the first day of school and use the photos in my student profiles.

Phew! Cannot believe I ran out of time. I also had a story to read and was going to take a photo of them holding a chalkboard with their name but alas this will have to be done on the first day.