Invaluable Beginning of the Year Tools & Tips

ORGANIZATIONAL 

• Online calendar template for planning: while paper planners are wonderful, this past year I realized having everything online helped me feel reassured and less helpless when we had to suddenly quarantine or wait for test results. It’s also less to keep track of and carry back and forth, and especially useful if you are co-teaching as you can easily share the document and track changes in real time. I personally use these online calendar templates and turn them into Google Docs, but many different formats or platforms would work depending on what is easiest for you. My co-teacher and I really like the commenting and tagging options on Google Docs. I would be lost without my calendars as they have EVERYTHING on there from basic lesson plans to students’ birthdays to my dentist appointment.

• Anecdotal notes: as mentioned above, it’s reassuring to have information online in case you aren’t allowed in school due to exposure at short notice. We take anecdotal notes about each child in a Google Sheet with one tab for each student and columns for different subjects and general notes (social emotional, family communications etc.), but you should organize yours however makes sense for you. I often make notes on a clipboard or post it while I’m with students, but I really try to make sure I then input my notes into our anecdotal shared document so that I know they won’t get lost and my co-teacher(s) can access them as well. Depending on your level of comfort, you can share the document with other teachers or staff who work with your students so they can add notes as well. I can’t share an example as it might include sensitive information and students' names, but set it up however makes the most sense for you and your team.

• SPED related ones: Gabby used Google Sheets with tabs for all of the endless data collection/ assessment trackers, created virtual point cards and incentive systems (tried a few ways for both, this could be its own post!). First /then boards or other visual tools especially around expectations are also so clutch especially at the beginning of the year! However, one of her favorite tools that she would use even in the transition into in person was making a Google Form for teacher input for IEPs so she didn’t have to go ask teachers/put a form in their mailboxes. Finally, while having a physical binder for staff was sorely missed during virtual times, she also found that having a clear template with running staff notes virtually is something she would keep. It let her link all of her staff training choices and plans she made to one place, and kept a running log of how everyone was doing or what she needed to communicate with staff each day. 

BRING THE KIDDOS IN 

• Family survey: I have always sent home a family survey, but modify it to the situation and after thinking about what might work best for the families I am working with. We always ask: Is there anything you want to share about your child/children? What are your hopes & dreams for your child in __ grade? Anything you want to share with our class (holidays, family traditions, hobbies or skills?) Since our opportunities for informal and/or in person interactions are so limited this school year, it will be extra valuable to get information from families however you can.

  • Depending on the families you work with, you can offer a paper copy or ask someone to help with translation as needed (or do it yourself if you’re lucky enough to have those skills). If you have families who don’t speak English at home and translation isn’t feasible, you can also change the format to make it less open ended and shorter

  • We always stress that it is optional and not something for families to worry about, just a way to share if you’d like! Sometimes families share names of pets or something students have been working on all summer that’s not school related, and it’s a way to positively connect with students the first week of school. It’s also nice because it is a neutral interaction with families before school starts, so if you do need to be in touch about something less positive, it’s not your first interaction (although we also try to send positive emails home for all students as soon as we can!).

  • For SPED, there should be even more background that you get to have for students-- at minimum a binder left by a previous teachers (I am a fan of keeping all of it!) about each kiddo, or a virtual folder for each kiddo with background, BSPs, Step up plans etc. Gabby liked having all of this organized virtually so it would be easy to refer to and adapt. She also put her Preferences, Interests and Strengths interviews with students in here so their voices (and how they change from year to year!) get to be in this folder, too. 

• I wish my teacher(s) knew: It’s so important to give students the opportunity to share with you, especially these days with everyone feeling anxious and a lot of uncertainty about the way the school year will play out. I find that it is nice to make a Google Form for students to fill out with a few questions to give students an extra feeling of privacy. But there are so many ways to do this so find a way that works best for you and your students!

• Shelfies! There are also so many ways to do shelfies. You can have families take actual photos with books or draw/write in titles they enjoyed this summer. You can also ask students to fill in a paper template at school (or online). I made sure to make an example and emphasize that some of the books on my “shelfie” were library books and many were books I re-read or read in the past and loved, so students know it’s okay if you don’t have a lot of books at home or didn’t have a lot of time to read over the summer. This can be a really nice ice breaker as it’s fun and creative. Of course, it is always great to know what kids have been reading or what books they’ve enjoyed in the past.

  • For SPED we had a few Bitmoji sensory and break rooms which were very helpful and big hits. Jamboard dolls and games that kids could dress up and really anything that they can personalize and share were all really great ways to bring themselves to the space, virtual or in person. 

• Names Activities: We love taking time to talk about, share, and love up on our names as we step boldly into a new community we will create together. We are going to use them all year with one another and grow into our names even more! We value taking the time to get to know each other's names not just in correct pronunciation, but in some of the stories behind them and who we are! Asking students how they would like to be addressed is so important. Books like Your Name is a Song, Becoming Vanessa, Thunder Boy Junior, My Name (excerpt from House on Mango Street), are all solid options. More details about these activities here.

We hope these ideas help you as you start this new school year. Sending healthy and calm vibes to everyone for Teacher New Year.

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Games to Play During Remote Learning or Physically Distanced Learning

Games, brain breaks, Morning Meeting activities, and community building exercises are a vital part of learning in our 3rd grade classroom. I’ve (Nina) been thinking a lot about how we can continue to incorporate games and brain breaks even when teaching over video or while staying six feet apart. Here are some of the ideas we came up with - Gabby is the game genius, so I asked her to help me brainstorm! We came up with two lists, which are below. I tried to link to a description or provide it myself unless it seems really self-explanatory, but if anything is not clear, please comment below and we will give you more details.

On live video (Zoom, Google hangouts, etc)

Keep in mind that a whiteboard with names or teams behind you where you can show them their points and keep updating it or keep track of rounds, etc. will help many of these! Also, depending on your setup, many of these games would also work in person and physically distanced!

• Name and a movement! (and then the group does it back to you) as a fun greeting 

• 20 questions (younger students often need a refresher on what is a “yes or no question” and practice re-wording their questions to fit their criterion).

• Mystery number (or country, city, classmate, food, letter/sound, book, etc): like 20 questions but more subject focused. Great way to practice Math notation! 

• Mystery voice! - all students look away from the camera (in the classroom, close their eyes until the teacher has told them to stop) and the teacher chooses a student to be the ‘mystery voice’. The teacher gives the mystery voice the thumbs up to speak and they say the agreed upon sentence (ours was, “I am an awesome third grader”) while all classmates continue to have eyes closed and the mystery voice student also closes their eyes to blend back in with the group. The teacher says, “Okay, eyes open, raise your hand if you have a guess for who is the mystery voice!”. Take 3 guesses and see if the mystery voice student can win! We found this was a great way to integrate fun adjectives to elevate vocabulary (enigmatic, deceptive etc.) while providing praise. It was also a fun way to settle into a nice (anticipatory) quiet, and let kids be creative and silly (with structure). 

• Dance break (not a game, but fun!) 

• Great Wind Blows (can’t do the walking around part, but could raise your hands and then pick someone to go next)

• Telling a story where each person adds a sentence (teacher or volunteer student who is old enough could type it and share their screen so everyone can follow along)

• Mad libs

• Simon Says: a classic movement break! You may need to operate on the honor system and let students decide when they are out. 

• “Hangman” but make it less violent and change the name/ complete a different image (like a cute simple dog face!) when they guess the wrong letters to fill in the blanks. 

• Jeopardy (need to set up questions beforehand)

• Pictionary (person who is drawing draws on paper and everyone else pins that video)

• Charades (same as pictionary but you act it out in front of your webcam)

  • Reverse charades (everyone acts one thing out and the teacher or one student has to guess what the group is doing by looking at everyone’s frames! This sounds hilarious to us. You also might have experienced this as “Heads Up” played on someone’s phone.) 

• Scattegories (pick 3 categories, 3 letters.. Would need to send them the paper to fill in their boxes) 

• I Spy (using your camera’s frame and you can set up a little scene) 

• Press conference (one person ‘leaves’ and the rest of the group decides who that person will be (someone famous or familiar that everyone knows). When the person “returns,” members of the group asks them questions (which also give them hints about their pretend identity) and they have to answer the questions and try and guess who they are. They usually get 3 guesses. 

• I’m going on a trip…: Students have to guess the pattern of what you’re bringing with you. This is so much fun and once students get the hang of it, they will volunteer to be the leader.

• Emotions Game: someone acts out emotions or you have to guess the emotion based on the image or a peer’s facial expression on video! This might be fun in teams with a timer (20 seconds for each emotion or acting out, etc).

While physically distancing:

All of these games can be played while staying six feet apart. However, we’d recommend having some kind of virtual (dots, carpet squares, tape on the floor) so students know where to stand. You might want to practice staying on your spots before you jump into a game and have a signal or word for when students need to check if they are still on their spots.

• Vegetable off: two students face off. The teacher asks the audience for an adjective and a vegetable (audience members whisper their suggestions or write them down so the competing kids can’t hear them). Then you count down, 3, 2, 1, and announce the adjective and vegetable (for example, “nervous green bean!) and the competing kids both have to embody a nervous green bean. We usually only give them 5-10 seconds with a verbal countdown as this can be hard to keep up. This would be terrifyingly awful for shy kiddos so maybe just keep this one as kids who volunteer, but it is always good for getting everyone laughing and awake! We have used it as a tie breaker at the end of a game when there are 2 kids left as the winners. 

• Read My Mind: (this is a game for kids in pairs). Put your thumb up when you have your word, countdown from 3 and both say your word at the same time. For example, I might say “shoes” and you might say “cheese.” On our next round, we need to try to think about what word might combine elements of shoes and cheese. We are trying to get to the same word over time through associations.

• Splash or Splat

• Zip Zap Zoom 

• Freeze dance: this is a classic! Play music and when the music stops, the last person to freeze is out. You may want to give students a box or circle to dance in to help them maintain physical distancing. 

• Wah 

• Heads Up, Seven Up: another classic! I remember playing this in elementary school. You would need to find a way to modify the tapping the thumb step (perhaps tapping with your foot three times or moving something with your foot), but ask your students to think of solutions that could work with staying 6+ feet apart and I know they will have lots of creative ideas.

• Around the World (we’ve done this with math facts, vocabulary, and geography!) 

• Bippity Bippity Bop 

• Look up, Look down 

• Who’s the leader?/Coseeki 

• Rock Paper Scissors Evolution: I’ve also played this with students where the loser becomes part of the winner’s entourage and cheers them on. That might be really hard with physical distancing though as the game ends with two large groups of people each cheering on their champion. 

Hope this list brings some moments of joy to your classroom (virtual or physical)! Please share any others as we’d love new ideas to try out. One last plug - Responsive Classroom always has new ideas and resources for Morning Meeting activities/games as well.

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Back to School Activities for Distance Learning

I (Nina) am preparing to go back to work after my extended maternity leave. This is shaping up to be an unpredictable and unprecedented school year, but I hope my students and I can still find joy in learning and getting to know each other. My school has decided that we will start the year fully remote, although we are small (and independent) so we are lucky to have an option of some in-person small group meetings to meet students and parents, do some technology training, and distribute materials at the beginning of the year.

Conceptualizing distance learning has been challenging for me. In August of 2018, I wrote about some of my favorite ideas to start the school year and I am trying to think about how I can still do some of those activities with my students, maybe with a new twist! I try to think about the purpose of the activity and how we can still achieve the essence of it in a new way. 

Here are some ideas:

• Names! Name activities are the best. They provide an opportunity for you to learn about your students and ask them how they would like to be addressed in class. They also create a chance for you to share something about yourself while learning about students’ identities. They are my absolute favorite and I am excited to brainstorm ways they can still work:

  • Create your Name: this activity was inspired by SEED. Have your students create their name in a way that feels good to them, using whatever materials they have on hand. You can explain the activity by modeling how you created your own name (using scrap paper or whatever else you have around the house). I used to take students’ photos holding their “name masterpieces” and put those up outside our classroom, but you could have students submit photos of their work and share them, or even put photos of their “name masterpieces” together into a collage and make it your virtual background (or if you have a way of collecting physical papers from your students, put them up on your wall, but this seems complicated). Here are some digital collage resources, and I’ve also used Google Photos to do something similar in the past. I love the idea of creating a collage (virtually or otherwise) as it’s important for students to see all their names together and know you are still a classroom community. It’s also great for new students as this way everyone knows how they would like to be addressed.

  • Name Stories: these are always fascinating, validating, and so much fun! I always introduce name stories with a read aloud (see name related read aloud ideas below), and then give students prompts to interview each other and ask about the story of their name. Interviewing each other on live video might not be possible, but you can have students interview a family member about how they got their name. Some great questions to give students to start with: Who chose my name?  Why did they choose this name for me? Am I named after someone?  What does my name mean or what significance does it have?  What do you like about my name?  After the interview (which you can skip depending on logistics), students can write their “name story.” This is a wonderful activity to get to know students and students enjoy it as well because they can share as much as they like or choose to focus on one aspect of their name that feels good to them.

  • Class “My Name” Poem: This extension of name stories is a great way to build community. I’ve participated in this activity as part of a group of adults, and we loved it and felt more connected afterward. Ask each student to choose one sentence from their name story to share. If you are in person, you can have students write their sentences on a post-it. If not, they can simply read it aloud or post it on Seesaw, Google Docs, etc if you are using that type of tech. I liked having each student read their sentence aloud and then I would type them or write them down, but it can be hard to keep up, so it’s nice to have them submit their sentences as well. Once you have all their sentences (don’t forget to include one of yours!), sit down with them when your students are elsewhere and arrange them into a poem. Later, share the poem with your students. They will love hearing their sentence and appreciating what the class created together.

  • What’s Your Name Worth? This is a great Math activity that helped me start the year by seeing how my 3rd grade mathematicians approached a puzzle. For 3rd graders, we gave them a chart showing all of the letters in the alphabet and a corresponding value in cents (for example, a is worth one cent, b is worth 2 cents, etc), but you can create your own chart with negative and positive values, Math problems, or really whatever works for you and your students. Once students found the value of their name, they could choose a teacher’s or family member’s name and then had to try and find names worth exactly twenty five cents or a dollar. Again, this is something they could work on independently and then either verbally share what their name is worth or post it on a website.

  • Name related read alouds (for the chapter books, you can read an excerpt of the relevant part): A House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jackie Woodson, Thunderboy Jr. by Sherman Alexie, The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi, The Favorite Daughter by Allen Say, My Name is Yoon by Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska, My Name is Maria Isabel by Alma Flor Ada - and there are so many more!

• Start a read aloud: We start a chapter book on the first day of school and it engages students in a shared reading experience from the very beginning of our time together. We read Save Me a Seat for our first read aloud last year and it was a perfect back to school book that fit into so many of the things we talked about (our needs as learners, our classroom contract, goal setting, appropriate challenge, and more)

• I Wish My Teachers Knew: give your students the opportunity to share their thoughts and concerns with you. This year, this is more important than ever!

• Numbers Important to Me: we use this activity to introduce our Math binders. In the past, we made the cover of our Math binders our “Numbers Important to Me” pages, but this year they could be shared virtually or displayed at home. Students write (and decorate) numbers and why they are important to them. For example, “5 - because I have 5 people in my family.” Make sure you make an example about yourself so your students can learn about you as well. This can be done on paper or on a computer - whatever works best for you and your students!

• Top Ten Lists: read the first chapter of The Top Ten Ways to Ruin the First Day of School for inspiration and then make a “Top Ten Things to Know About [insert your name]” list. Again, make an example to share! Students LOVE reading these about each other, so would be great to share virtually. If you want to do a live share, I’d suggest telling each student to choose ONE thing about themselves to share.

• Letter to Yourself: this can be a wonderful first day or week homework assignment (for older students) or an in class activity. Have students write letters to themselves making predictions about the school year. In the past, we would seal them in individual envelopes, put them away, and then give to students on the last day of school, but this year, you could have students email you letters or submit documents however works for you, and still either send them back to them or print them and hand them back (if we are in person again) at the end of the school year. This can also be a great tool for goal setting! I’d suggest creating an example that you wrote talking about how this year is new for you and what you are going to work on as this will be excellent modeling for students.

• Hopes & Dreams: set hopes and dreams for this school year. I always model with one of my own and try to have one that is social emotional focused and one that is about learning or trying something new. You could explicitly model to students how you modified your hopes and dreams for this year in a new setting or format. Later, use your students’ hopes and dreams to move into creating classroom rules and goal setting (more ideas and details are available from Responsive Classroom).

• Guess Who?: have students send in three “clues” about themselves (tell them beforehand that these should be things they are comfortable sharing) and every day, have a different “mystery student” where you share the clues throughout the day and take guesses about which student you are learning about! You may want to ask for more than three clues and then only share three in case the clues are too obvious or something you’d rather not share.

• Reader Survey: I’ve found that my students love filling out surveys online (we usually use Google Forms). I get so much more information from them through this medium, although they often use emojis to express themselves as well. Make a survey to get to know your students as readers. This is extra important right now as reading is one thing we can encourage students to do as an academic activity, but also something fun to do when other fun options are mostly off limits. Since we won’t be able to recommend books to students in person, knowing them as readers so we can try to recommend books through online platforms or the public library (ours in DC are open now with mostly “take out” service) is so important.

• Daily Life Word/Story Problems: this is a great way to model how we incorporate Math into our daily lives. Start by sharing some you wrote about your day. I’ve discovered that students love anything about babies and pets (don’t we all?). For example, I gave my baby 17 pieces of mango. He dropped 5 on the floor, put 2 in his hair, gave 1 to me, and ate the rest. How many pieces of mango did he eat? After you share, give students an assignment to write some of their own, and then during your next class (or later in class), they can share their problems and discuss different ways to solve them and “prove” their answer is correct.

• Share a photo: this depends on your comfort level and what you feel is most appropriate for your students. My co-teacher and I are sending our students a photo postcard of us (email or posting on a site would work too) so they can see our faces before the school year begins and get a nice note from us welcoming them to our class. If you are sharing photos virtually, it might be nice to send multiple photos showing how you are getting ready for the school year.

There are, of course, so many more ideas and possibilities, so please comment below with any of your go-to beginning of the school year activities and tips for modifications! If you are starting the year in person or in a hybrid model, any of these activities could still work. Sending strength to all teachers starting this new year, but especially those who still don’t know what their school year will look like, or how they will stay safe and keep their students safe.

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