Bulletin Boards

Bulletin Boards are great! Teachers can use them in many different ways, whether or not they want to display names at the beginning of the year or use them to demonstrate something they are going over in class. They can be decorated in all kinds of ways and the students can even decorate them themselves. Below are some ideas of bulletin boards, as well as some pictures of bulletin boards if you need something to go by in order to recreate.

*The first great idea is to put a large coconut tree in the center of the board, with coconuts falling from it, one for each student. Put the students names on the coconuts and put the title "Chica Chica Boom Boom look who's in my Room".

* The second idea is to cut out a large bubblegum machine shape and filled it with 4" circles with each child's name and picture.

*Another idea is that you could do is to hang a "fishnet" from a party store and put fish shapes with each child's name and picture with the title "What a Great Catch!"

* A good one is to make a large puzzle out of 4-5 sheets of oak tag (24x36 I think) with enough pieces for each child to get one and a few extras for late arrivals or adult helpers. On the first day of school have each child decorate their puzzle piece. Use the puzzle to learn classmates names for a few days then put them all together on a bulletin board with the title " You Fit Right In !".

Ice Breakers

1)What do we have in Common?
Rules: You begin by setting up chairs in a circle, but set up one less chair than the number of participants. The teacher can start the game by being the person in the middle without a chair. "Each person in the circle starts by introducing themselves to their two circle neighbors on either side. The teacher then introduces herself or himself to a member of the circle and asks that person who his or her neighbors are. After the student responds, the teacher invites the student to ask a yes or no question of the whole group. That question must relate something true about the student. Then the cycle starts again. Students introduce themselves to their neighbors, the person left standing introduces himself or herself to a new person, and the game continues.
Example: a student who surfs might ask the group if anyone has ever been surfing. Members of the class who have surfed respond yes not by talking but by getting out of their seats and finding a new seat at least two chairs away."

2)Paper Faces
Rules: Everyone I the class gets a paper plate, and is asked to decorate it with something that represent them, like a hobby or favorite T.V show etc. then they are asked to put their name somewhere on it they can ever incorporate it into their decoration. Once everyone is done, everyone goes over to a table or in a circle and shares who they are and what they drew on their plate and why. Once everyone is done the teacher will take them up and may use them as a bulletin board, so the class can look at them again if they need help remembering someone’s name orto see if they have anything in common.

3)Candy Talk
Rules: You have a basket of candy; you pass it around to the class and tell them to take as many pieces as they want. Once you have made sure all the students have gotten some you tell them that they have to tell the class one thing about themselves for each piece of candy they took.

4)Observation game
Rules: Line up your students in two lines facing each other; if there is an odd number of students, then play with the unmatched student. Give the students exactly 30 seconds to look at the person with whom they're paired and to study everything about that person. Then the students in one line turn around and close their eyes while the students in the other line change something about themselves. Then the kids in the other line turn around and try to name what has changed. Switch roles and play the game again.
Example: one person may take off an earring, switch shoes, or put their hair behind an ear.

5)Venn Who?
Rules: Hand each pair of students a blank Venn Diagram form. The students work together to complete the activity. One student writes his or her name at the top of one of the circles, and the other student writes his or her name at the top of the other one, In the overlapping portion of the circles, the partners must list five things that they have in common. In the parts of the circles with their names, the students must each list five things that are unique about themselves.

6)Snowball Fight!
Rules: Students write on a piece of paper three things about themselves. Then they crumple the paper up into a 'snowball' and have a one-minute snowball fight. At the end of the minute, everyone grabs the closest snowball and has to try to find the person who wrote it. They then introduce that person to the rest of the group, sharing the three facts.

7)The Giving Tree
Rules: Read aloud Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree and involve students in a discussion of the types of gifts the tree gave the boy; none of those gifts cost a thing. Then talk about the types of cost-free "gifts" the students can contribute to the class. Prepare a bulletin board that has the silhouette of a tree trunk and branches. Give each student a cutout apple. Have students write on their apples the things they can "give" to the class. Put the apples on the tree. This bulletin board makes a nice display for open house.

8)Get to know you bags
Rules: During Open House I give my new students their first assignment. I supply a white paper bag for them to fill with five items that will tell the class a little about them. They fill the bags with pictures, magnets, small stuffed toys, medals, past report cards, awards, etc. Throughout the first day each student will share what's in their bag and why. I also fill a bag myself and go first. I show enthusiasm about every item that they show, they love the individual attention!

9)Me Puppets
Rules: On the first day of school (unlike the remaining days of the school year), the children are usually reluctant to talk about themselves. We make "me" puppets using paper plates for the head, yarn for the hair, and construction paper facial features, with a popscicle stick for a handle. Upon completion, we stage a puppet show. The children hide their faces with the puppets and tell their classmates all about their families, hobbies, pets, etc.

10)People in My Family Assessment
Rules: On the first day or shortly thereafter, I have the children draw a picture of their family, but the rule is: only the people that live in their house. It's amazing to see how unsure some children are. It gives a lot of good information to the teacher. For younger children, they dictate the names and ages of family members, for older students, they can write them themselves.

Fun Classroom Activities

Here are a list of fun games to play in the classroom:

FOUR CORNERS
Four Corners is popular with teachers and students. Number the corners of the classroom from 1 to 4. Select one student to be "It." That person closes his or her eyes while the rest of the students go to one of the four corners in the classroom. When all students are settled in a corner, It calls out a number. All the kids who chose the corner with that number are out of the game and must sit down. It closes his or her eyes again, calls out a number, and more students sit down. When the game gets down to four people or fewer, each must choose a different corner. If It calls out a corner where nobody is standing, It must choose again. The game continues until only one student is left. That student becomes It.

SEVEN UP, STAND UP
This game is another old favorite! Choose seven students to be It. Those students go to the front of the room. The other students put their heads on their desks so they can't see. The seven Its wander the room. Each taps one of the seated students on the head. As a student is tapped, he or she raises a hand. When all seven Its return to the front of the room, they say in unison, "Seven up, stand up!" Each student who was tapped has an opportunity to guess which student tapped him or her. If a student guesses correctly, he or she replaces the person who did the tapping. The game begins again when all have had a chance to guess.

SPARKLE
This game serves as good practice for the week's (or previous weeks') spelling words. Arrange students in a line. The game leader calls out the first word. The first person in line calls out the first letter in that word. The second person calls out the second letter. The third person calls out the third letter and so on. The person who says the last letter in the word must turn to the next person in the sequence and say sparkle. The person who is "sparkled" must return to his or her seat. If a word is misspelled, the person to say the first wrong letter must sit down and the spelling of that word continues. After a student is sparkled, the leader calls out a new word. The game continues until only one student remains standing.

PIECING THE PUZZLE
This game requires a little preparation -- but it's worth it! To prepare, laminate five pictures. Calendar pictures are great for this activity! You might laminate pictures relating to a teaching theme and then cut each picture into four to six puzzle pieces. (Note: You want to end up with one puzzle piece for each student in your class, so you might create a variety of four-piece, five-piece, and six-piece puzzles.) Hand a puzzle piece to each student. Let students wander around the classroom to find their "puzzle mates"!
Extra challenge! Laminate pictures from a themed calendar. Imagine students' trying to piece together pictures of the 'N Sync musical group -- or the confusion spotted puzzle pieces from a calendar of Dalmatian pictures might cause.
Tip: This activity might be fun for the first teacher meeting of the year too! Every teacher could contribute a five-piece puzzle to a collection of puzzles that travels the school!

Backs to the Board Game
This one is good for higher level kids. Make two teams and stand one Student from each team in front of the board, facing away from it. Write a word or draw a picture on the board (e.g. "hamburger") and the Students have to explain that word to their team member (e.g. you can buy it in McDonald's, it's got cheese and ketchup in it). The first Student out of the two standing in front of the board to guess the word wins a point for his/her team.

Google!

I love google! I have just recently been introduced to the wonderful world of google, which contains more than people know. I have learned that they have Word Processing, Spreadsheets, and even presentations, which is like PowerPoint. They are all easy to use and come with great advantages. The BIGGEST advantage is that it is mobile, you can access them from any computer with Internet, eliminating jump drives. The best thing of all , like my my EDM 310 teacher would say is that it is all FREE. It also has a great search engine with images, maps, news, and shopping. You can also set up an account for email, and they have an icon called iGoogle which is a place where you can add gadgets that are to your interest, and it will track things like weather, news and what ever else you want, its like a "one-stop-shop" for all the information you want to know.

*Blogs*

Blogs can be used in so many ways, for personal reasons or for a class in school. While in my EDM 310 class i found out that blogs are a great way for teachers to get their students involved in technology. They are used for posting assignments, and are even used by the students to submit assignments to their teachers, instead of handing in a paper, they just write it on their blog and the teacher can access it from the Internet. Below are two schools that i found that use blogs in their classroom, and i will explain how they specifically use their blog.

The first school i found that is incorporating blogging is Joseph H. Kerr School in the Canadian town of Snow Lake, Manitoba. This is a combination of seventh and eighth graders who go onto their blogs and talk about school assignments and their social lives. This has created not only a way of communication between students for school but it gives them a way to communicate socially, which keeps their interest. The teacher who is setting this up is Clarence Fisher, who says "he thinks the online journals will spark students' enthusiasm for computers, writing and opining". He goes on to say that he loves that it gives the students a voice, they are learning that their opinions matter. I think this is great because it prepares them for the real world, where you will meet all kinds of people, some with the same views and some who have different views.http://news.cnet.com/Blogging-101--Web-logs-go-to-school/2100-1032_3-5895779.hml

The second web-site i found was about a teacher named Mrs. Robertson, who is an English teacher in Ontario. Her blog is for her seventh grade class, in which they can discuss novels. Once again it gives students a voice, She really has a great point when saying "“The beauty of it is that my really shy or my weak readers get to respond to the novel discussion with as much power as my mouthy or my ‘great’ readers,”. Her blog consists of questions about novels they are reading in class, not only questions they can answer themselves, but doing things like interviews and having them post their conversations and answers on the blog. http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/06/using_blogs_as_a_novel_approac.html