First Week of School Writing Activity

While I will have many other lessons going on the first week, one of the most important will be teaching digital skills as well as digital citizenship. The first thing I did was to make a list of things I wanted my students to be able to do on their own. The list was LONG. You can see the list below. I’m also quite sure there are things I even left off that I didn’t even realize.

digital-skillsDownload

Then, I started looking for ways to cover as many of those as I could quickly. The skills highlighted in yellow are skills we will cover with this activity. They are also skills that the students could go back and reference by accessing the prior activity videos and documents if needed. I am working on a hyper-document that will have links from all digital skills to videos. That way, students who have forgotten how to do something need only to look at the one document in order to find help with how to do something. I will be using Edpuzzle to house all the links and videos because all my school devices block YouTube. However, any YouTube video housed in Edpuzzle can be shared as a public link. You can find how to do that here. I will share my hyper-document as soon as I can get it done.

The activity I have chosen to do is inspired by an applied digital skills lesson from Google. The lesson videos and instructions are already done. Plus, it loads seamlessly with Google Classroom. WIN-WIN. The activity has students working in small groups to make an If-Then story in Google Slides. View the project from Google here. To find out how to load these activities in Google Classroom, click here.

I always like to work through the activity on my own before I have students working on it. So, here is my example story. It will ask you to make your own copy. Once you have your own copy, click view slideshow to see how the story works.

One thing I found out quickly was that you really need to talk with your group about how to keep the story simple to avoid making 400 slides. My “children” are 29 and 21. They had way too many ideas for this story. It took a lot of guiding from me to narrow the story down to something manageable. In my classroom, I plan on asking students to have a conference with me to work out the details to the story together before they begin the digital work. I will ask them to do the brainstorming sheet, and then they will sign up for a conference time with me. We will probably use Google Meets or Zoom so that we can stay away from each other while also allowing for those at home to participate in a group. This is a good chance for us to talk about how we should act during those meetings and how to log in, etc.

During this meeting, I will join the students inside the slides and help assign each student a slide to work on. I will write the slide heading at the top myself as we decide on each story part. I will also show students how to change the background color to individual slides. Students will then choose a color and change their assigned slides to their color.

Once the meeting is done, students should be able to work fairly independently on completing their slides. Once everyone has completed their portion, we will have a day where I load them all in Google Classroom for students to view and play with.

One thing I did notice about this project was that some of the slides would occasionally not be an option to link to, so I will need to show students how to search for the slide. It isn’t hard, but it is annoying.

Here is my schedule of sorts:

Tuesday: Log into technology. Sign into our school account. Have a short conversation about what comes with this account: show Google Drive and email. Give a brief tour of Drive and what it is for. Explain that we will be talking about email at a later date. They are not to use it until then. Have students join Google Classroom. Discuss marking assignments as done. Class comments/private comments. Post an assignment on Google Classroom. Have students practice making a class comment, private comment, and marking the assignment as done. For me, that’s enough for the day. I will have other activities for the rest of the time. I will post those as soon as I get them done. They will be a longer social studies activity and a short writing mini-lesson.

Wednesday: Have students log into Google Classroom. Review what we learned the day before. Discuss the project. Assign groups (make a google doc to attach to the assignment in case students forget who their partners are or can’t remember how to spell their names). Ask students to work on completing the brainstorming page. Give them about 20 minutes. With the rest of class, we will do a social studies activity and short writing mini-lesson.

Thursday: We will have a social studies activity and begin writing workshop. Students who finish those beginning activities will be encouraged to finish brainstorming and sign up for a time to conference.

Friday: I will begin conferencing with students on their project while students work on social studies and writing activities independently. I feel like I can get two groups, max going on this today. Since I plan on having three or four people in a group, that will be about half my class. Lucky me! My class will only have 13 kids in it!!

The second week I will continue conferences and students will work on their own when they have time. Since I know students will need time to play around with the digital skills, I am going to lessen my normal writing workshop time the second week. I’m sad to do that, but I think the digital skills are going to have to come first in this instance. Hopefully we can finish by the Friday of the second week.

The First Day

I can’t think of a year in the past twenty-five that I have slept the night before the first day of school. You would think at some point the nerves would subside. Nope. Every year I lay awake wondering: Do I even know what I’m doing? What if they all fail? Will I scar them for life with something I say or do???

I’m not even going to bother you with the things I will worry about this year. I have no doubt you are already thinking the same. So instead of dwelling on things I can’t do one thing about, I’m going to think about the things I can.

Of course, some of this might change, but here are our first day plans.

At whatever kind of meet the teacher night we have, we are going to be making desk buddies. You can read about those here.

Since we will hopefully get all our parents set up on Remind, we will ask them to send a short note to us to leave on their student’s desk that first day. We did this last year, and the kids loved having a note from home that day. Anyone who doesn’t get a note from home gets a note from us or a previous-year teacher. We have two workdays after meet the teacher, so we have plenty of time. This might be too stressful if you are short on time. We had them write the notes on note cards last year, but we will copy and paste the notes from Remind onto one of the tags below this year. Students who are working from home will get a note from teachers instead of parents.

Students can still have a mint or chew some gum to relieve stress without removing a mask, so we are also going to have some mints and gum on their desks using the little tags below. You can open and make your own copy to improve. Graphic arts isn’t exactly a talent of mine. They will do though if you aren’t picky and in a hurry. You could quickly change the colors to fit your room. When you print them, just go to print settings and preview. Then change it to four slides a page to print the mint/gum pages. That gives you two students per page. Make sure you only select those slides to print. I will print the parent note tag as one page. We can have the tags and mints in the supply bag for those who are at home.

Tags

Now, onto some of the planned activities. This gets tricky because not everyone will be IN the classroom.

1. Arrival Activity: We are going to buy some little containers for students who are in school. Students who are not can possibly pick theirs up when they come for supplies, or I will send a recipe parents can choose to make at home. If they don’t have playdough at home or make any, they can still participate by virtually brainstorming ideas and talking to their in-class partner as they work. Students can work through the activities on these slides while we wait on everyone to get to class. Even on a normal first day, students rarely arrive at the same time. Since we could potentially have staggered arrival, we may have even longer to fill before everyone is settled. If we give them some time to just build whatever they want before we start the challenge, I think this could potentially fill up to 45 minutes of arrival time.

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2. Desk Buddies:

We are going to do the get-to-know-you activity below using our desk buddies we made. I wanted to open the floor for some conversations about how weird this all is. I thought if we involved the desk buddies in the conversation, it might be a little less weird.

The activity can be printed to put on desks for in person and loaded digitally for those who are online. I plan on sharing the answers to each page as a class except for the last page. The last page is for a private note to the teacher. I think this could take at least 45 minutes, possibly longer.

You can click the link below to make your own copy to adjust and improve.

Get to Know your Desk Buddy

3. Rules conversation:

This is usually a pretty brief conversation for me. I have only two major rules: Be respectful and responsible. We have a conversation about what it looks like to be respectful to each other and also what it doesn’t look like. We do the same with responsible. This year, I will also ask them if there things about this year that might be different that we need to consider when being respectful and responsible. I don’t know what safety measures will be in place, but I know those will need to be discussed here. We will also discuss being respectful and responsible to our online counterparts. Below is the image I am uploading as the background image to Google Classroom. If you want a copy, you can click on the caption below the image. The clip art I used comes from Shore Side Studio (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) This particular Alien pack was free.

Download Image

3. Recess–Here are some social distancing recess ideas I found online.

https://www.asphaltgreen.org/blog/rep-it-out-games-for-social-distancing

4. Teacher Rotation Activities: In the past, we have done morning classroom activities followed by afternoon short teacher rotations. This just usually involves me getting to know their names and telling them a little bit about me.

5. Extra time: With any extra time, I usually read aloud from a book called There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom. I’m honestly not sure if that is possible legally now for my students who are at home. I am currently trying to contact the publisher to see if that’s possible. I usually read this book during the first few weeks of school when we have extra time. I’m not sure if I will just not read to my students from home or what to do. If any of you have ideas about how to handle it, please share. I’m at a loss.

In my next post, I will share my first week writing activities. They center around teaching digital skills in case we need to go remote in the future.

Thinking About Going Back–Meet The Teacher

No matter your religious beliefs, I feel like we all are having similar feelings about the future right now. These Bible verses from James, book 4 have really been stuck in my head lately:

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make a profit.” 14 You do not even know what will happen tomorrow! What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord is willing, we will live and do this or that.”…

Seriously! Who even knows what tomorrow or even this afternoon will look like. I certainly don’t. Keeping this uncertainty in mind, my team and I have begun the process of making some tentative plans for the first week back. I plan on sharing these ideas in a series of posts this week.

First Up—Meet The Teacher:

We don’t actually know if this will be in person or online. We do know our school is doing all the usual beginning-of-year forms online for everyone, so at least we won’t have to mess with those. For the most part, I want my online and in-person students to be doing as much of the same work as possible. I want all of them to be able to interact in as many ways as I can think of because I think that is going to be something they are really missing right now. However, I do think both groups will have different needs. I think my online students may really struggle with missing being at school with friends…even friends who must be six feet apart. I also think that my in-person students may really struggle with separating from home after this extended time away from school. I am very concerned that anxiety will be at an all-time high.

One thing we want to do for our anyone able to come to meet the teacher in person is to make a security item. It must be small and something the students can keep to themselves. It also needs to be something that can be easily replaced if it needs to be disposed of. My team landed on these. We obviously won’t keep them in a single jar. Each student would need to keep them in with their own supplies.

Our amazing school is buying all the supplies for our students this year. Because of that, we won’t have students bringing in supplies for meet the teacher. Instead, we will sort supplies and organize a few days before students arrive. Students will already have beginning of school supplies inside their desks that night.

We usually have parents fill our forms while students organize supplies at meet the teacher. Since we won’t do that, we will have supplies already out on desks for students to make the critter friends. We are also going to ask students to be thinking of a name for their critter and have it ready for the first day of school. We are going to tell the students that the critters will have a surprise for them when they return to school the first day. Our hope is that this small incentive and security item/imaginary friend will help that first day seem a tiny bit less scary.

Although this isn’t set in stone at this time, we plan on giving our online only students the same activity to do from home. Parents will be coming to pick up the school supplies for home anyway, so we will just include the craft supplies with that package. If these parents decide it isn’t safe to pick them up, or if we start school totally virtually for all (who even knows?), we will ask students to find small materials around the house to make their buddy and write down its name. If students ever transition to in person, they may bring their buddy with them.

While students do this short craft, we are going to use this a form to gather some info from the parents. Since much of this will be done with online registration, we aren’t asking much. Basically, we are asking how they will go home and if parents will consent to being signed up for a Remind account with us. We will NOT be asking parents to handle paper forms or even filling this out digitally. We will just ask them the brief questions and record it ourselves on the Google Form ourselves so that no one is touching technology except us.

We will reach out with a phone call or Zoom/Google Meet to anyone registered who did not attend in person meet the teacher. We will explain the desk buddy craft, answer any questions we can, and help them fill out the Google Form.

Here is the desk buddy instructions and the Google Form we are using. The form will prompt you to make your own copy.

Google Form

Desk Buddy Instructions: There are three different sets of instructions. The first page is for in-person, the second is for distance learning who picked up supplies, the third one is for distance learning with no supplies from school.

desk-buddy-instructionsDownload

My next post will tell a little bit more about what we are going to do with the buddies and the surprise we will have waiting for them.

I know this is an anxious time for us all. It is for me too, but I am keeping my heart open to what the future holds. I have a feeling it will be much more normal than we think. We will have to face some hard things (like always), but we will also be gifted some incredible blessings along the way.