First Day

I've been pretty busy this week and just haven't been able to find any time to write anything new. Today was the first day with kids and it was fantastic.  I had posted awhile ago about a couple first day activities that I planned on doing so I thought I'd give a quick update on how things went.  Everything here has already been mentioned, so instead of rewriting about it I'll just link over to what I'm talking about in case you missed it.

I started out all of my periods by handing these cards out and they went over really well.  In one period a kid at the first table started to sing the song out loud and a couple kids across the room (that hadn't yet received cards) thought he was crazy until they got their cards and were in on the joke too.

I got many kids that got the card, read it, and then told me "Ok, now this is good.  I like this."  I consider this a high compliment coming from teenagers.  I also had a handful of boys who are not Carly Rae fans that told me that they did not like the card.  They didn't say it in a rude way at all though and it was funny.

In my 10th grade classes I played my 31 card game.  This also went fantastic.  The kids were grateful to be working on something instead of going over rules and such.  I always figure that a lot of people are doing rules the first day so I just save it for a different day to break things up a bit for the kids.  So out of my three classes, there was really only one kid that wasn't into it and that was during the last period of the day.

During one period I overhead two kids discussing whether or not there was a prize for the game (I had forgot to mention that there was!) and between the two of them they figured they were probably too old for prizes.  When I came over and told them that of course there's a prize, the girl told me that I am officially her favorite teacher which made me laugh.  I guess that's pretty good for the first day, huh?

My one 9th grade class is also my homeroom so after doing homeroom stuff there wasn't enough time to play the game.  When I passed out the supply list I got many strange looks about the six rolls of tape so I took the extra time to go through my ISN Prezi.  This wasn't my plan at all, but they were interested so I figured it was a good time.  They were very impressed by the Prezi and thought it looked cool.  I really enjoyed doing it on my iPad because I could use the arrows to go through the presentation, but I could also pan and zoom in on anything that I wanted to really easily.

I only went into depth on the ISN in one period, but I did hand out the supply list to all my classes and do like a 5 minute overview of the ISN just to justify the need for so much tape.  I was actually very impressed with how many kids of mine have done ISNs before so I think that's going to make it easy to get started which is great.

Some other random highlights:

• I had a kid offer to build me a podium and another one say she can teach me how to use fondant..excellent.
• I ran into six kids that I taught as 8th graders last year and it seemed like they were grateful to see a familiar face that they could ask for help.
• The kids I had last year told me that they still have their ISNs at home and didn't throw them out. I was thrilled to hear this.
• I'm teaching a lot of kids that live in my town and went to the same elementary and middle school as I did.  We even shared some of the same teachers which I think is pretty cool.

So overall I think that I'd say today was a success.  Hoping for another great day tomorrow and maybe even finding some more time to blog!