Team Up!

Wow! Today has been a whirlwind! It was my first day back with students. It was fun to see all the new faces and get to know them a little. This first week back my biggest goal is to set the classroom culture. Most of my students come to me with a lot of bad feelings about math. I feel like this first week is to try to get the kiddos to forget about the past because this year is going to be awesome! I tell them they're going to LOVE math at the end of the year. This is my goal as a teacher; to make math fun and teach it in a way that students can understand it.

Today we used grouping sticks for a getting to know you (GTKY) activity. Since I only have 20-23 students in each class, I took out 2 colors of sticks. If you haven't used grouping sticks, they're a great way to regroup students quickly with totally new groups (no student will be in the same group with someone twice). You call out a color, number, or shape for the groups. Super quick and easy. 

Students were grouped to do the Roll a... Tell Us... activity. Groups did the activity for about 3 minutes, then they regrouped and started again. This was a fun, quick activity to get students starting to know each other.  (I forgot to take pictures...bummer.)

You can get the grouping stick labels here for free. You can use these on regular popsicle sticks, they don't need to be colored.  They're printed on address labels, then cut apart. The document is made to make 2 sets of sticks. 

This is the Getting to Know You Dice Roll. You can get this activity from my TpT shop. It's a FREEBIE!!

Check back throughout the week for more team building activities.