One of the most important things teachers do at the beginning of each school year is create a warm, welcoming classroom community. Educators know that students need to feel physically and emotionally secure before they can learn and take risks.
"Before the brain can attend to cognitive learning, students must feel physically safe and emotionally secure...A positive learning environment increases endorphins in the bloodstream which generates a positive feeling and stimulates the brain’s frontal lobe to support memory of both the learning objective and the positive situation." Sousa &Tomlinson, 2017
As a former math teacher and current math specialist and curriculum coordinator, I love building a classroom community through math at the beginning of a new school year. In addition, it is important to start the year by fostering positive attitudes towards math so students feel they have capacity for success. Here are a few of my favorite mathematical ways to build a classroom community at the beginning of a new school year:
- Getting to Know You By the Numbers: This can be adapted to any grade level and can be as open-ended or as structured as you would like. Ask students to use numbers to describe themselves. If you teach early elementary, students may simply use basic numerals, and if you teach upper elementary, students may create numeric expressions to describe themselves. Upper middle/early high school students may write algebraic equations that, when solved, allow the class to learn more about them. (This can also be used as a way for staff members to get to know each other. Modeling ideas that can be implemented in the classroom is always helpful!)
- Math Read-Aloud: Doing a read-aloud from a picture book related to math is one of my favorite activities, not only to kick off the school year, but to start new units of study. Read-alouds are great ways to help students recall prior knowledge, build connections, and appeal to diverse groups of learners. I wrote a more detailed post on math read-alouds a few years ago, but one of my favorite read-alouds for the beginning of the school year is The Math Curse by Jon Scieszka. After reading, students can write their own "math curse" story about how math has followed them around in their own lives. This can be done in a variety of ways depending on how in-depth you want this to be (i.e. good old fashioned paper/pencil, in a blog post, or using an app like My Story or Book Creator).
- About Me Math Photo Stream: A classroom is a diverse place, and it is important to share and appreciate what makes each member of the classroom community unique while also finding out what we have in common. To start the school year, I have asked students to create an "About Me Math Photo Stream" by taking photos using 1:1 iPads (or personal smartphones) of at least 5 items that are meaningful/special to them. The caveat is that the items must be related to math in some way. Student creativity really shines through with this assignment, and we get to learn a lot about each other as we share our photos via a gallery walk or short presentations to the class. Some students have shown photos of nutrition labels from favorite foods (Hot Cheetos and Takis!), photos of their street addresses on mailboxes, photos of their favorite sheet music to play on the piano, and photos showing athletic accomplishments like batting averages from their baseball seasons or swimming times from swim races. Students can also use Clips or iMovie to add narration to their photos if they have iPads, which then allows these to be viewed outside the classroom as well since the narration is built into the student-created product.
What do you do to build your classroom community? How do you make math approachable to your students at the beginning of the school year? What a privilege it is to be a teacher, the one creating these circumstances for rich learning to occur! Wishing everyone a fantastic start to a school year of full of wonder and growth!
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