Welcome back to school round 2: week 0

I made it through the first week of school- yea!!!

Actually, the first week of school was pretty much great. A LOT of things I planned to do went totally according to plan. Teacher friends know- that almost never happens. My students are MUCH better at listening and following directions-- they're even kinda quiet. I LOVE it! (pause to knock on wood) PLEASE let them stay like this the whole year! I feel like I earned it after last year.

My school has a lot of things I like about it as a teacher. We have pretty good professional development where they actually module how they want us to teach in our classes. We had PD sprinkled throughout the week before the students came and I pulled a number of ideas from there. Our school gives us A LOT of freedom to teach how we want to in our classes. We don't have textbooks and our curriculum is kinda loose, meaning we can fit it in wherever we think it fits in. We do have a scope and sequence laid out to guide us, but we are welcome to flow with the student's inquiry. Also, we're not expected to teach any curriculum the first week. We are encouraged to spend the whole first week on procedures and setting up our class community. I think any teacher would tell you just how vital this is to a successful class the whole year. I would also like to say please don't think that makes it ok for your child to miss the first week. I think they miss out on A LOT if they miss out the first week. I had 3 students not come the first week- 2 of them came on Thursday, the last day of the week. (One of the mom's told me she was sorry but it was "impossible" for him to be there before Thursday. I'm sorry, was he not allowed in the country even though he's Kuwaiti? I don't think it was "impossible" as much as inconvenient to their summer plans. Whatever.)

In an IB classroom we don't do a lot of decorations on the walls. There are some IB posters we have to have on the walls, but mostly they are supposed to be empty and then filled with student work. I did however put this on my door. My friend Brooke- a teacher here last year- tagged our team in a Facebook post with a picture of a door like this, so I did it.

I pushed my comfort level a little bit this year. I really like things to be organized just so and I kinda like to control things like that. This year, after one of our PDs, I decided to NOT set up the tables and chairs and let the students do that on the second day. It took me about a day of telling myself and others that I was doing it to fully wrap my head around the idea and actually come to like. The idea grew on me because it would be easier to do some of the get to know you games with this set up, it would allow the students to get to know the classroom and other students, they would feel ownership when they set it up, and they will have a better idea of who they want to sit by-- until I change their seats next week. ;) I set the class up with all the tables pushed to the walls, the carpet in the middle, and chairs all around it. Like this:

Set up for 1st day of school. The colored paper on the wall will be my word wall. 

Different angle-- you can see the IB posters we put up.
The yellow, white, and purple squares will have student work later one. 

The classroom stayed like this the whole first day and into the morning of the second day. On the second day I gave them the challenge to work together and set up the classroom. Some of them tried to draw it out on the white boards, some of them just started moving things, I think they talked about it a little bit on the carpet before they started- if I remember correctly. Setting up looked like this: 

In action. You can see some of them at the whiteboards drawing it out. 

The end result. They liked the carpet in the middle. Totally not how I would have set it up, but so far it seems to work. It's a little squishy in some areas, but still working. 

Other highlights from the week:
We took a tour of the school. I had the students come up with the places they thought were important to know- which was a good idea because they thought of places I wouldn't have that ARE important. I was going to let them lead the tour as well, but that would have taken FOREVER and I just didn't have time that day. This is the list of places we went:

In the late morning of the first day, I asked the students what questions they had- any questions. I wrote them all down and told them that some we would answer now and some would be answered later. After writing all the questions I asked if anyone already knew the answer to any of them. As students answered I crossed out the question and wrote the answer next to it. I elaborated if I needed to. As we did things throughout the week many of the questions were answered with our activites. We revisited the questions every day and I asked the students if they knew the answer to any more of the questions. They basically answered all the questions by the end of the week. It was kinda awesome. I didn't just sit there and answer questions, THEY answered all the questions. (happy teacher moment!)

Some questions/answers were erased by the Arabic teacher-- grrr!
My favorite questions: Why are we not working? and Will we have tables? 

Another very important thing we worked on was our classroom agreement, or essential agreement. I think many non-IB schools/classrooms are doing this, but basically the students come up with the agreement (rules) of the class. We did several activities leading up to this. We did and activity answering questions like "What is important to have in our classroom?" and "What do you want to do in the 2nd grade?" Building off those I had the students make goals for the year. I don't remember how I had them do it-- individually and then as groups or just individually. After they did that I took them, combined similar goals and wrote them all on chart paper:

The next day we reflected on our goals as a class. Then I had each student work with a partner and come up with 5 essential agreements (rules for the class) that would help us achieve these goals. After they did that I had them work in 3 groups of 6 students (we were missing a few students that day) and each group had to come up with 5 essential agreements. Then I put all the agreements each group came up with on the board. We combined similar ones and picked the most important ones. We ended up with 6 essential agreements for our class.

The ones with check marks were ones that multiple groups had. There were two others I erased because they were similar to the other ones but I can't remember what they were. 

This was THEIR verbiage- good job 1st grade teachers! I followed up to make sure they knew what it actually means. There were at least a few that knew what all of it meant and the rest of them learned what things like "open minded" mean. 

One other thing I did with them that was fun was a hashtag lesson. During our PD I read this blog (http://justwonderingblog.com/2012/09/24/said-no-true-inquiry-teacher-ever/) that was based around #whatnoteachersaidever. I decided that in discussing what we wanted our classroom and school year to look like this year, I might be able to use this same idea. We talked about what a hashtag is-- some students knew- and then I showed them a list of sentences I made like; I love noisy students. I don't want to take summer break! I like a messy classroom. I asked them what they thought the hashtag would be- they got the idea that it was opposite but they didn't get the hashtag so I told them it was #saidnoteacherever. I read the sentences with the hashtag after it. Then I let them come up with sentences for #saidnostudentever. They wrote them on sentence strips and I put them on my bulletin board in the hall.

Some highlight: I love a trashy school. I hope we don't learn anything. I don't need a teacher.
I hate caring. I don't want to play. I hope students don't help people. 

There were a few more things but that's pretty much the highlights and this is getting too long. :)
PLEASE let the rest of the year be as awesome as this week!!