A Peek at My Week {September 1, 2013)

Welcome back to A Peek at My Week linky party!  I hope you will link up and share some thoughts about your upcoming week.  Thank you to the 28 wonderful bloggers who linked up last week and the 350+ blog readers who stopped by.  It was a great turn out for our first week and I know that this week will be even better!  :v)

 

Here's what I have coming up this week...



Monday is Labor Day!  I'm hoping to "labor" as little as possible on Monday.  My husband is working (retail NEVER seems to close for a holiday) so we will probably just grill out when he gets home.  I found this recipe for Lemonade Cake that I think I'm going to try out.  (Cooking when I WANT to isn't "laboring", is it?)

Tuesday is our first day of school with students.  We had lots of meetings last week and some time to work in our rooms so I am ready to go!  We will work on building a lot of classroom community this week.  I found this two great activities to get to know your students that sounded kind of fun.

The first came from my friend Bethany at Hunter's Teaching Tales and her Spark Saturday post called "Graph Yourself."



Bethany goes into great detail about how she did this activity, but basically you give students some graph paper that has been labeled with the digits 1-10 on one axis and all of the subject areas on the other axis. (You can also add in other school related activities like behavior, being responsible, recess, etc.)  Asking students to be completely honest, they create a bar graph rating themselves 1-10 on how strong they feel they are in each subject.  Then, students share the two areas they are highest in and the one they are lowest in.  This can lead to a great conversation about how we all have different talents and some students will need more help in some areas.  (Seriously...I cannot explain it well enough to do it justice.  Please visit Bethany's blog to read all about it!)

The other activity I found while I was scooting around the internet this morning checking out all kinds of blogs.  You know how it goes....you click on a page, then click on a page, then click on a page, you find a great idea, you click on another page, then you forgot where you found that great idea to give credit to the author...So if this is your idea, my sincerest apologies!  (But I think this will be so fun that I wanted to share it!)

This second activity involves having your students sit in a circle and passing around a roll of toilet paper.  Tell students to tear off a few squares (don't specify how many.)  Some kids will take just a few, and others (probably the jokesters) may take a whole bunch.



Once everyone has some TP squares, each person takes a turn tearing off a TP square as they share something about themselves.  Not just "my name is" or "I have one sister," but GOOD "get to know you" shares.

The teacher should go first so I might share something like this:


* My first name is Jennifer.  Everyone in my family has a first name that starts with the letter J.
* I have made over 30 baby quilts to donate to premature babies at the Children's Hospital.
* I love to wake up early in the morning (even on the weekends) to read and watch the sun rise.

You get the idea!  Imagine the great things you can learn from your students with this get to know you activity!

I am so excited to start Writers Workshop this year!  On the first day, we will begin talking about writing and put together our Writer's Notebook with the Divider Pages from my TpT Store.

I have so many great ideas rolling around in my head from my summer experience with the UW-Milwaukee Writing Project.  Stay tuned to hear how it goes!

Friday will be our first home football game at my kids' high school.  They are both playing in the Pep Band.  It should be fun!  Can't wait to hear how the band sounds (after four days of practice).  God bless our band teacher!!

That's it for my week!  Grab the button and link up to your post!  Try to leave some love for others who have posted by visiting your link-up neighbors.  :v)