My favorite activities to do the first week of school in my math classes are the Week of Inspirational Math activities from www.youcubed.com. This website has premade weeks of activities, or you can create your own week from pages of resources.
Creating the Lessons for the First Week of School
To get the Week of Inspirational Math (WIM) activities for the first week of school go to the website www.youcubed.com. Choose Tasks and then choose Week of Inspirational Math. When the page comes up, you have the option to use the old WIM at the top. The older version has 4 weeks of activities to choose from. Each day of the week has a pdf with the agenda for the day and a copy of the activity. You can look through the weeks for your grade level and decide which one you would like to do.
There is a now another way to create your own lessons for the Week of Inspirational Math. You click the grade level and the topic and decide what activities you want to use. You can choose the videos and activities you want for each day. There are many different activities to choose from. As you choose your videos and activities, they are added to a playlist under the day you chose.
Using Week of Inspirational Math Activities
Using the Week of Inspirational Math is easy. Read over each lesson for the week and gather materials you need for each day. It helps to do the activity yourself so that you will be able to help groups and answer questions. Decide what parts of the lesson you want to do and be ready with extensions of the activity for groups that may need it.
As you are doing the activities each day, teach the students classroom procedures for getting materials. Go over group work expectations before students work together and walk around reinforcing those expectations. As students share their work, teach them expectations for sharing and listening.
The Week of Inspirational Math helps the teacher create an exciting mathematics classroom environment. It shows students that it is okay to struggle and encourages them to keep trying. All the tasks are created so that struggling students can be successful and advanced students can be challenged.
Conclusion
Many teachers think they do not have enough time to spend on the Week of Inspirational Math. You will not regret it if you make time for the activities. The activities encourage your students to think and explore. It is great to see students get excited about solving math problems. When you see the excitement and engagement of your students you will be encouraged to create more opportunities for exploration throughout the year.
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