It is easy to feel overwhelmed as a new teacher, or student teacher, as the case may be. There are many goals and objectives to meet, policies and procedures to learn, names to memorize, routines to establish, things to organize, and the list goes on. It is particularly easy for new teachers to be overwhelmed by the number of resources available to them. For example, a google search for "opening day activities for first grade" returns 2,820,000 hits! While this may seem like a blessing, it can quickly render a new teacher motionless. After all how does one choose the "best" activity from among 2 million ideas?
My tip of the day is to take out a piece of paper and write down, yes write (with a good old-fashioned pen or pencil) the learning goal and objective you want to achieve. So, if you are trying to think of an opening day activity for first graders, write down what you hope the activity will help your student learn. Your goal might be to establish a community of learners and your objective might be for students to be able to give a classmate/friend a compliment. Once your goal and objective are clear in your mind, it will be much easier for you to weed through the resources on opening day activities. If you get lost in a sea of resources, let what you wrote down be your anchor. Return to it frequently in your search for the best activity. Don't give in to the temptation of choosing a "cute" activity if it does not meet your objective. If you are like me and can't pass up a cute activity, then bookmark it or copy and paste it into a running word document called "Cute Ideas For Later". That way you have it when the right opportunity to use it arises. But for now, target your curricular goals and objectives!
Here is an example of a fun morning meeting activity that meets the goals and objectives described in this post. The activity is called Beanbag Hello and I copied it from the following website: http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/friendship.html
Play the Beanbag Hello Game!
It is nice to say hello to a friend. It shows them that you are thinking about them. The teacher throws a beanbag to a child. This child says hello to another child in the circle. After the first child says hello, s/he thinks of something nice to say to the other child. The first child then throws the beanbag to another child. Continue until each child has caught the beanbag and said hello.
