First Day of School

Just completed my first day of school for the 2013-2014 school year, and I have to say it was quite the day.  After reading Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess this summer I did much less talking and more activities to get my students excited about the upcoming year.  Today was anything but a syllabus day in my class.

First the students walked into my brand new classroom set up which I've kept secret until today.  There are pictures of it on my last post.  I even had a student tell me it wasn't fair because now I've made her excited for math class; imagine that!!  Since I see some of my students more than once a day I had to think of a couple of different activities that we could do so I could float around the room and connect with students I have not met before, or that I have not seen all summer.

The theme to my room to start the year this year, in honor of the upcoming movie, is The Hunger Games. 

What my students saw as they approached my door.

I have a District 6, District 7 and District 8 bulletin board to represent each of my groups of students, and math classes today consisted of creating a person that represented them out of pipe cleaners.  I then took a picture of each student, printed the picture, and tomorrow they will cut out the faces to add to their person and they will be placed into their respective district.

 

  I have to say the students were much more innovative than I would have been with their people.  I also let them decide what facial expression they wanted displayed on their person and there were some creative ones there as well.  I was a little nervous that students would fly through this and we would be left with a bunch of extra class time, but students took their time and really put their effort into their projects.

After lunch we switched gears and got a little more techy.  Our school has a set of 25 ipads that teachers can check out to use in their classes.  There are many apps that have been downloaded onto these ipads that I hadn't realized last year, so this summer I took one home to play around with and discovered how easy iMovie is to use.  Knowing that most of my students had little to no experience with this app, and knowing that they could use it for many different projects this year, I had my ELA students create a trailer for a movie that would represent their summer using iMovie.  They had a blast playing around and learning the app.  I was honest with them when they asked questions and I said that I was learning how to use the app as well, and they didn't mind.  I will say the one downfall that I saw to the app is that I could not figure out a way to save a project that was not finished so that it could be accessed by any ipad.  Since the ipads can be checked out by anyone in the school they have to be returned to the office each day, and when they are plugged back in most of the work is wiped clean from the ipad.  Most of the other creative apps that we use allow us to export projects to other apps like Box or Dropbox so that they can be accessed later from any ipad.  Luckily I spoke to my principal and so the ipads we were using were set aside so the projects would not be lost and could be finished tomorrow. Here is an example from one student that finished her video.  Pretty impressive for not having any advance notice and only a class period to finish.

 

It was a busy day, to say the least, but I am excited to see where we go from here.  I hope everyone else had a great first day as well.  I would love to hear about it!!