Second Day of Second Class

The first few days back are always tricky because you don’t have the usual timetabled day. It is important to use this time to set up the expectations and procedures that you will be using each day in the class. Getting these right in September will set you up for success for the rest of the year. Of course, you will need to come back to these throughout the year, particularly after breaks like Christmas and Easter but if you get them right in September, the routines should bounce back quick enough after some reminders.

This post will focus on my second day with second class. I have already done a detailed blog post with links and resources for day one which you can find here. Like I said in that blog post, these are activities that I have used before, that I feel work for me for what I want to teach over the first couple of days, they won’t be to everyone’s taste or work for all classes. You are the best person to decide what you can take from this and what will and won’t work in your own class, trust your own judgement.

8.50 Task Boxes & New Attention Getter

My mornings all begin the same way. When the students come in there will be a task drawer on their table. Each of the groups will have a different task drawer to what they had on the first day. These task drawers will rotate each day until each group has had a turn and then the next four task drawers will be rotated. Like the first day, on the second day students will be using Lego, Magnetic Tiles, Gears & Construction Straws. I will give the students 25 minutes to play and settle in on day two. There will be a timer set and when it comes to the last 5 minutes, I will instruct the children to start tidying up, like we did the day before.

During the children’s play, I will teach them another Attention Getter that I will be using in the classroom this year. This one is a good one to use if you want to save your voice in the classroom. I will teach the students that when they see me tapping my head, they must stop what they are doing and copy my actions without making a sound. I begin always by tapping my head, when I see I have most students attention I begin changing my actions, tapping my shoulders, nose, mouth and eventually I cross my arms when I have everyone’s full attention. It works because it just takes one student to notice what you are doing and gradually as more students start to copy you, the whole class begins to notice and copy too without you having to say a word. During their play time I will practice this a few times with the class, rewarding students who respond quickly with Class Dojo points.

9.15 Affirmation Cards

When the students have tidied up, I will introduce them to our class affirmation cards. I have an entire blog post on how I use these and what the benefits are for using affirmation cards with children here. I will talk to the students about the importance of positive self-talk and what using affirmations can do for us and when we can use them. I will use the random picker on Class Dojo to pick a student to come up and pick a card out of the deck of 52 cards. The student will read out the affirmation to the rest of the class and we will repeat it a couple of times together. I have a space on my whiteboard where I will put the day’s affirmation on it and we will refer back to it throughout the day.

9.20 Review of Class Rules, Expectations & Procedures Kahoot

A lot of what we did the day previous will be repeated in the second day. Reinforcement and repetition is so important over the first few days, especially with younger classes, to ensure they are actually acquiring the information. We will go back over our anchor charts from the day before about what makes a good student, teacher and classmate, what our class rules are and a review of certain procedures we have learned from the day before such as lining up in class, on yard, how to walk in the corridors, going to the toilet, tidying up and so on. When we have reviewed the information, we will have a Kahoot quiz. Each of the students will work in pairs on the quiz using chromebooks. Kahoot is a fantastic assessment tool and the students from 1st right up to 6th absolutely love it! But with this also comes certain expectations to be taught such as volume levels and so on. We will talk about all this prior to starting the quiz.

I will only make up the quiz after the first day in school. This is because I want it to center around our discussion on the first day and the rules that we came up with as a class together. The quiz will be personal to the students sitting in front of me. I will also include pictures of the school and staff included in the quiz to help students get to know their new school.

There are so many amazing quizzes already on Kahoot to suit so many different subjects so it doesn’t always have to mean making your own quiz. It is a great tool for Irish assessment also, I personally have used lots of the themed quizzes during my Irish lessons.

10.00 Read Aloud & Volcano Activity

Next we will be reading My Mouth is a Volcano by Julia Cook. This book is about a child who can’t help but interrupt everyone around him. He struggles to keep his thoughts to himself until it is his time to speak. He refers to his mouth as a volcano and when his volcano erupts, his thoughts just come spewing out of his mouth. I love this book because the repetition in it gets the students involved, by the middle of the book they are almost saying the words along with you. When the boy in the book is finally interrupted by others, he begins to learn a lesson and realises quickly how frustrating it is when others interrupt you. He learns a method of being able to stop his volcano from erupting.

After reading My Mouth is a Volcano, we will make a chart about the different times when it is okay to interrupt, like when someone is hurt or feels sick (there are lots of examples of these on Pinterest), and the different ways that we can let the teacher know that we need something, like making a T sign to show we want to go to the toilet without having to interrupt a lesson.

I will then teach the children a new breathing technique, while also going over our roller coaster breathing from the day before. On this day we will be learning box breathing. I will explain that breathing techniques can help us when we feel like interrupting others too, sometimes taking a few deep breaths, like Louis does in the book can prevent us from letting all of our thoughts out. Breathing techniques are something I use everyday in the class before and during lessons.

Finally we will do an activity worksheet, all about controlling our own volcanoes and how we can stop ourselves from erupting and how we can let others know that we want to speak.

11.10 1, 2 & 3 Star Class Family Wordsearch

Like the 1, 2 & 3 star colouring the day before, I will also show the children a 1, 2, & 3 star word search. I will give the children 3 examples on the whiteboard, one will have a pencil just doing a line through words on the wordsearch and no ticking them off at the bottom, not all the words found, the next will have a circle around the words in pencil, and the final one will have each of the words circled and coloured in with different colours, words ticked off at the bottom as they were found and all words found. The idea of this is to teach the children how to take care in their work and begin to take pride in how they present it. Again we will have a discussion about which wordsearch deserves 1, 2 and 3 stars and why. The students will then get their own wordsearch with all of their names and staff names that they must find. I will let them work in pairs to do this.

11.40 Cassie Stephens All About Me Paper Sculptures

After finishing our wordsearches, we will begin some getting to know me art. I love this lesson from Cassie Stephens. I won’t go into much detail as Cassie has a blog, videos and templates all about it here which is detailed way better than I could ever explain it. For me this will reinforce for the students what we learned the day previous about using a glue stick. I love how these sculptures turn out as they all end up looking completely different but yet students can see that there are so many similarities between them in the class. This art activity will be done over 2 days. There are two templates on Cassie’s website that can be used for this so we will use the first of these which is pictured above on this day.

1.10 Gaeilge Days of the Week

After yard and lunch we will do a small Gaeilge lesson revising what we did yesterday about the days of the week. I will go over the vocabulary, practice the song and then play a game of cluiche Kim with the days of the week posters on the whiteboard. For anyone who doesn’t know, Cluiche Kim is simply putting up pictures on the board of the vocabulary, in this case the days of the week, students close their eyes and teacher removes a picture, they have to guess what was removed and the game repeats. I will then give the students a worksheet where they will be cutting out the days of the week and sticking them into their copies in the correct order. This will allow me to teach them about the procedures around using scissors, how to hold them, moving around the classroom with them and what to do with their scraps of paper. I saw a great idea that I will be using this year where the teacher uses a whiteboard marker to draw a circle on each students table, the students then put the scraps of paper in the circle and when it comes time to tidy up, one student can go around with the paper bin and slide these into the bin. It avoids paper ending up everywhere and the important information being lost in scraps of paper.

1.40 Golden Time

Our last 45 minutes of the day will be free play time. I have explained Golden Time in detail in my previous post so I won’t repeat myself here. The students will get to use any of the task drawers, chromebooks, play table tennis or board games or do art. I will teach the children the expectations around each of the things that they choose to use in terms of tidying up after and how to be respectful of the materials.

This is all just a rough idea of what will happen on day 2 and is likely to change. We usually have an assembly on a Friday morning so if this goes ahead, I will have to leave out an activity, probably the wordsearch but we will see on the day. Like I said in the Day 1 blog, I will also have filler activities at the ready should there be a need for them on the day. Lots of things from Day 1 like lining up practice, tidying up after lunch and so forth will also be repeated on this day but I didn’t feel the need to go into that again today. For more information on any of these or on ideas for filler activities check out my previous blog post about the first day in second class.

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