New Teacher Orientation?!?!

This past Friday I attended my new school district's New Teacher Orientation. It felt so strange after having taught for 11 yrs. and 9 of which were in the same county. I met a lot of people and look forward to seeing them around the district. Overall it was a review, and of course what would be a New Teacher Orientation without a little bit of Harry Wong; always a good read before the start of school.

There was one handout I really enjoyed. It was titled The Seven Things Students Want to Know on the First Day of School. Curious? If you have already started ask yourself if you answered these questions...
     1. Am I in the right room?
     2. Where am I supposed to sit?
     3. What are the rules in this classroom?
     4. What will I be doing this year?
     5. Who is the teacher as a person?
     6. How will I be graded?
     7. Will the teacher treat me as a human being?

So which one do you think is the most important? Did you answer these questions when your students started?

On another note I have been working pretty hard in my room...and I think by Tuesday or so I should be able to have a reveal for you! I've been doing the normal teacher decorating "stuff". Making signs and cutting out laminated items.

One shortcut I use in my room is gluing my lettering (that I cut on my Circuit cutting machine) to sentence strips, then laminating them. Makes cutting them out SO much easier, AND when I go to hang the signs/lettering up I don't have to worry about keeping the letters straight!

 

 

Monday begins four days of teacher workdays for me! My plan was to have my room almost completed so that I could focus on lessons, curriculum, and all the little things that as a "new" teacher you have to learn prior to the first day! I think I have stuck to that plan. I even got my toes and hair "did"...so BRING IT!

 

Stay tuned for the reveal! 

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!