First Day of School Icebreaker Help for High School & Middle School, High School Teacher Vlog

please don't make me do this please don't make me do this hey I'm Laura and I like llamas my name is Laura and I like lava lamps my name is Laura and I like lamppost [Music] you're here because you don't wanna be lame on the first day of school and I want to help you not be lame so in teaching high school and middle school it seems like teachers fall into two camps on the first day of school either they go way out of their way to make kind of fun and engaging with these super painful icebreakers that everybody hates you know the name game the human bingo the two truths and a lie no please no they're awkward and require kids to overshare with a group of strangers that's super scary when you're 14 and you just landed on high school campus so don't do that to them or the other camp are the teachers who just are all about business and they're you know that don't smell till Christmas and reading the syllabus to them and then we're getting down to work don't read a syllabus to these people they can read so you can hit the highlights whatever but you want to have something that's going to be memorable and interesting and get them up out of their seats and maybe meeting a few of them and give the spotlight off of you so you can get to know some of them also so here is what you're going to do you're going to use stations down below there's a link where you can have all the slides I'm going to talk about and show and the stations that you'll print and put up there's eight stations that you'll poke around your room and the worksheets that kids can finish at the end of the hour if there's time or that you assign for homework on the first night again totally free I just want to help make you awesome so here's how it works well after you've introduced yourself and kids of made name cards and you're ready for this part of the lesson you're going to project this first image and give every kid eight sticky notes kids are going to number the sticky notes one through eight and then they're going to fill out the sentence completion so you give them the seven stems and then they fill out their responses once everyone has those sentences completed on their sticky notes and they don't write your sentence or they just write their answer part of it then you count them off into eight groups and you have them go to the appropriate station and around your room you have taped up the sheets that are down there which are basically the same questions that they filled out so team one goes to question or spit number one team three goes in since number three and off to the races they go the teams three or four kids they'll be I try not to get teams that are more than four three is the perfect number three means there's no Deadwood you can't hide once you get to four kids there's always that one kid is kind of like an introvert and holding back and doesn't feel as engaged so for me I found that three is the magic number for group work and this is group work so each group goes to their station and they have a conversation about what they wrote on their sticky note and then they share they ask questions of each other why is that important to you what made you say that oh that's just like mine and then when they're done and they'll be less than two minutes they'll put their sticky notes up on their station and then you give the all call and then everyone moves to the next station they just kind of go around the room there will be eight cycles of that and as you get later into the rotation there'll be more and more stickies on the wall and so the kids can have deeper conversations about what their classmates had to say and they'll start to see kind of themes once eight rounds had happened they'll end up at the station where they began and that's good now they're going to sort them into C's in my classes I got like 34 kids so they're going to have 34 sticky notes they've got to kind of cluster in whatever way makes sense the answer of their question and then after they've sorted them you're going to go around team by team and ask them what were the three most common themes they saw that their classmates answered for this sentence prompt and then have a conversation about it let it roll naturally you can add like follow-up questions you can fold in class expectations at that time if it's a natural fit you know just make it authentic after all a team have given their two cents about the most important things then each team gets a index card for me and there you have a conversation about everything they heard and class today what's the most important thing that they want me to take away from the conversation by putting that on me I'm doing a couple things I am showing them that I care about their opinions which I totally do and I'm also having them synthesize and digest and discuss and decide well speaking and listening group work activity as they figure out what they think is the most important I already kind of know what they're going to come up with but it's interesting to have them decide and then they give me the cards and I look over the card at the end of the activity have them unsticky everything for you to get ready for the next class and then you can move on to the worksheet which is individual back at their regular seats where they're filling out for you I'll put it up here somewhere over here here filling out the worksheet about who they are their interests from a personal inventory which is a good kind of relationship builder what I like about this is on the first day you've got like fifteen to twenty minutes of walking around talking to teams and making connections with kids it used to be my first day was a lot of like lecture me talking at them and by the end of the first day I'm exhausted and the kids are exhausted you know think of six classes and they got six people like me talking at them hour after hour after hour no thank you so that's my idea for you hope you give it a go the there's a version for English teachers you're my homies but then I also made a more generic one for our friends in history and science and math and electives and world languages anybody who needs to have a more interesting way to start the year hope you check it out all right you guys you have a great launch of the year summer is almost done make the most of it I'll see you next time bye everyone chewy ice I've chewy ice it's a hundred and one degrees out here but I got chewy ice oh my gosh so I just got into the car to enjoy some air conditioning glance in the mirror and realize that this stick see that that was in my hair the entire time I made the video call to tell me when to stop in my head oh my god - [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Laura Randazzo

Views: 232,661

Rating: 4.8872728 out of 5

Keywords: first day of school, icebreakers, cheesy, first day of school lesson ideas, help, secondary teachers, high school English, high school, middle school English, middle school, first day games for teens, teenager lesson ideas, free lesson ideas, free lesson materials, classroom management, lesson plans, icebreaker, game to play on first day of school, learning stations, station rotation, non-cheesy, don't be lame, English teachers

Id: uUG-Tx4Rqng

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2017