Starting the New Year Right — Buckle Up for Week 1 #made4math

This is my second year at my new school, which I guess technically makes it no longer my 'new school,' huh. *facepalm*

This matters because Year 1 in a new place is always a time of establishing a reputation, but my reputation got totally screwed up last year because this year I am being positioned by the kids as cool flavor-of-the-month "nice teacher" everybody wants to have.

So to protect my street cred, I need to ruin my reputation at the start of the school year — and fast.

"INB Overview" foldable glued into my sample INB

DAY 1
I'm introducing Interactive Notebooks this year in my math classes, so everything during my Week 1 this year is going to revolve around that.*  Day 1 will be my "Introduction to the INB," including The Ceremonial Decorating and Labeling of the INB Cover, The Death-Defying Gluing-In of the Table of Contents (TOC) and other general reference pages, and most importantly, The Making and Filling-In of the "Rules & Parts of the INB" Foldable (photo at right).

This is the most important thing on Day 1 because I am giving a test on the INB Set-Up and Use bright and early on Day 2.

DAY 2
The test covers the six key things about INBs that I want students to have down cold from the start: the TOC, LHS and RHS pages (plus the LHS and RHS acronyms, which will be useful in working with equations and inequalities), The Rule of the Page (i.e., the fact that everybody stays on the same page), The Rule of Attachment (the fact that nobody leaves until (a) everything is glued into INBs and (b) INBs have been put into their zipper bags and hanging files), and finally, the purpose and importance of the Daily Date Stamp.

The message I want to send here is that, in Dan Meyer's words, "We use time well in this class." I also want to communicate that I am a badass unicorn who gives a test on Day 2 on actual material that is vital to your survival in my class and isn't that totally unfair and OMG. So let the word go forth — stay on your toes in my class and do not be fooled into complacency by my seeming niceness or my obviously wrongheaded reputation.

Using the set-up and use of the INB as my core "Day 1 Lesson" also allows me to teach classroom procedures through a foldable, which means that students learn how to use and study from a foldable right away. It also gets everybody onto the same page and creates that sense of shared suffering at the hands of a crazy teacher that is so vital to classroom community-building. ;-)

It also lets me put some teeth into the bellringer activity on Day 2. The test will be time-limited, so there will be no time for screwing around at the start of class.

The test will be a "trade and grade" affair, so that all I have to do is enter the scores into Power School and hand them back. While someone collects the tests, everybody will glue their INB Overview foldable onto page 7 of their INB.

Then I'll stamp page 7 of their INB and we will move on to creating some Chapter 1 pages and getting down to the business of Chapter 1.

DAYS 3, 4, and 5
The Day 2 Test will be taped into the INB first thing after the bellringer on Day 3. Taped in and date-stamped. No monkey business.

These days will cover Lessons 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, complete with in-class activities and homework. It's important to establish our routine right away so I can jump on any students (and parents) who need a nudge to get with the program. By the time we have our Back to School Night, I expect parents to have seen, signed, and checked a number of activities and documents that will become part of their student's INB.

DEALING WITH HOMEWORK
My thinking about homework is to deal with it separately. I'm going to set up a file box for each class with a hanging file folder for each student. Since INBs will live in the classroom and can only be brought home to study for a test, the hanging file will provide a home for each student's INB Ziploc bag as well as their archived loose HW papers.

To carry materials back and forth between home and school, students will use a two-pocket folder that contains their current chapter HW assignments as well as a stash of binder paper. I want to use the LHS pages for higher-level processing work rather than simply pasting in HW.

LHS PAGES FOR BELLRINGERS (& SOMETIMES PROCESSING)
That also allows me to use bellringer time for students to do active processing of the previous day's material on their LHS pages. I'll keep you posted on how well this works, and I'll be curious to hear how others deal with the LHS pages.

By the time we reach Day 4, we'll be deep into mathematics. That is the best way I know to communicate my in-class goals and values to students.

More on the opening lessons and materials in my next post.

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*I use the acronym INB rather than the more common IN or ISN because my school is acronym-heavy and both of those acronyms already stand for other things at our school. For once, I'm not intentionally trying to be a cheesehead.