As summer is wrapping to a close, I am excited to share more than 30 first week of school activities to help you choose the perfect activity for your classroom. The first day of school is one of the highlights of my school year, and I look forward to crafting a fun and engaging experience …
Several years ago, I heard about the Let’s Make Squares activity from an OKMath Newsletter sent out by Christine Koerner. She recommended Let’s Make Squares as a great activity for the first week of school. I had already decided that I was going to do the 2s to 9s Challenge as my first day of …
Lonesome Llama is an excellent first day of school activity/first week of school activity to teach students how to effectively communicate in a group. The activity is from IMP (Interactive Mathematics Program) Groups of students are provided with a deck of cards. Each card features a different llama’s house. Students must work together to figure …
Survival in the Desert is a cooperative groupwork task. I have used this task in the past as a first week of school activity. I learned about this activity from reading Kagan’s Cooperative Learning book. I’ve seen the same activity featured in other books as well since then. Today I want to share some free downloads I created …
Most likely, you’ve ran across some variation of the two buckets puzzle at some time in your life. You have two buckets. One bucket holds exactly five gallons. The other bucket holds exactly three gallons. How can you measure exactly four gallons of water into the five gallon bucket? Groupwork Norms for the Two Buckets …
This cup stacking challenge was a super fun and engaging activity for my chemistry students during the first week of school. I’m teaching a chemistry class this year for the first time. My class is made up of all juniors and seniors with the exception of one sophomore. I taught almost every single one of …
Build It is a cooperative, team building activity that encourages students to work together, communicate, and think logically as they construct a geometric object to satisfy a set of given clues. If you’re looking to work on vocabulary, this activity introduces/reinforces words such as “face” and “edge.” I learned about Build It from Stanford’s website. The …
Count to Ten is a team-building activity that I like to use at the beginning of the school year in those random five minute pockets of time that tend to pop up. I usually try to share on my blog where I got the idea for an activity from, but I honestly have no idea …
A few years ago, I created a set of group work roles posters for my classroom. These were inspired by Ilana Horn’s Strength in Numbers. Sadly, I have to admit that I hung them in my classroom that year and NEVER once used them. I wanted to do group work, but I …
Late last week, I spent some time prepping for another first-week activity inspired by Elizabeth Cohen’s Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom. It’s called “Guess My Rule.” Y’all are probably tired of hearing me gush about this book, but I seriously learned so much about groupwork this summer from reading it. It made me …