I am bringing you today two different activities to incorporate into your classroom that provide knowledge into each of your students. It can be a way for you as their teacher to get to know them, as well as for them to get to know one another!
The first is my back to school interview cubes! You can find
here.
I include directions inside the cubes to help you put them together, or your students can. I had my students work in four groups the first few days of school and then they presented on one person in the room for the class to get to know them. I found that students would rather tell about someone else rather than themselves, sort of an icebreaker.
Here is the cover on TPT.
Here is a picture of a cube put together and one that has not. I would print on cardstock, it makes them hold up a lot better.
So as you can see, the questions are very personal, and what I love the most is that it's requiring the students to think outside of typical questions such as what's your favorite color, food, etc. I have included a recording sheet with the product, but I found last year my students loved writing about this person in their journal to have to look at all year long. At the end of the year they reasked those questions, and to some of their surprise, their thoughts changed - which leads to a good whole group discussion!
The next product I have for $1 that can be used primarily for upper grades is my early finishers journals. I loved this product so much last year in my classroom. I had those students who got done SUPER fast and then would be a big disruption if they were either pretending to read, or bored. These are just covers, I cut out and glued onto the front of spiral notebooks and they could go choose whichever they wanted. My only requirement was that there are NO JUDGEMENTS on what someone else writes, this is a way for them to write back and forth to each other, tell me things they may not be able to, etc. They can leave their name or they don't have to. Some students have never had the option of writing anything they felt down, and this helped. The stories can be real or made up, doesn't matter! It's totally just a way to get them writing, and they don't even realize it's benefiting them!
This is the cover and can be found here on
TPT for $1.
This is an example of what one of the covers looks like. Since I am teaching writing this year, I plan on going back and adding a bunch of new titles, so I would get it while it's on $1 if I were you ;)
My favorite thing is replying to the students. I wish I had a picture of the notebooks from last year, but they are in one of my 50 boxes in the garage!!! This year I vow to take more pictures!
Anyways, I hope you enjoy these two products! They are so much fun in the classroom and great to introduce as back to school activities!!!
