Our First Day

I managed to survive our/my first day in fifth grade! This year I have been given the task of teaching fifth grade and transition. For those of you that don't know what that is, I have the students who failed the fourth grade end of the year test. They had a chance to pass it in summer school, most passed a few sections, but those placed in my class still failed a portion....this is about half of my class. I tell you this just in case you see a few things posted and think, "wait I thought she was teaching 5th grade this year!"

Okay so now on to our first day and what we did. The students had some board work, what we call Big 5 to complete. Big 5 is simply five math questions (and I also do 5 LA questions) that are possibly review of items we already learned or are struggling with. Seeing that it's the first day of school it was simple end of fourth grade math problems.

I also wanted to give them a little something else, so I saw a few of these questions on Pinterest. They were each given six sticky notes and had to write their answers and post them, I did allow them to be anonymous if they wanted.

Here is what they looked like, I LOVE some of the responses, I hope you can read them!

Student responses to What will you need to be successful this year?

 

 Next set of questions:

Student responses to What do you hope to learn this year in 5th grade?

Student responses to Our class should be _________________ everyday.

Next set of questions:

 

Student responses to What kind of teacher do you want?

Student responses to School is important because __________________.

 

Another activity we did was creating name bubbles. A good picture book to read with this is: The Name Jar. I was really pushed for time today, I did read You Are Finally Here! and This is the Teacher. Here is mine and my interner's bubbles:

Each student made their own name bubble. They then had to partner up and shared their bubbles with each other. Once partnered up they "introduce" their partner to the class and share at least two things about that person.

We then did a fun Twitter activity! They each got to make up their own Twitter name and draw their own avatar (I have a little mimio I made for it, I'll have to take some Hypersnaps and show it to you all later, I left my school laptop at school tonight, on purpose!). Once we had those two things completed they got to write their own Tweet, sticking with all the Twitter guidelines! Here is how they turned out.

A few of you had asked how my clipboards were mounted on the wall. Just plain hooks...hot glued on the wall. That simple!

Hope you first day goes as well as mine did!