It almost didn't even matter that my SMARTboard speakers wouldn't work and that the broken air conditioning made my room so humid that I was literally slipping and sliding by the end of the day. And working on revisions to my syllabus up until the bell (if we had one) before my first Spanish students walked in actually had little to no effect on my blood pressure!
 |
| See that little speaker under the bulletin board? My husband got it paired to my iPad this morning, and it worked beautifully!! Adding to the beauty: my library on the left and my Art Club display on the right. |
I promise you, amigos, I am not speaking ironically. In spite of almost physically melting, yesterday truly was an excellent first day of class!
I had decided I needed to address them directly for this to work, so I scrapped the stations. I also needed to get them INVOLVED A. S. A. P., and fortunately Sra. Whisenhunt gave me just the in I needed with Nicky Jam's new song! (More on that in another post!)
After we got good and silly with some call & response, I laid it on the line: it's my job to BE UNDERSTOOD, and to make that happen, I will 1) direct your focus, 2) establish meaning, 3) repeat excessively, and 4) check in regularly.
Then I gathered some crowd pleasers to do a little PQA at Mme. Laine's suggestion (incorporating the choral "AWwwww" I got from iFLT for all "no me gusta" responses).
Then we collaborated to "decide" which order the class questions should go in using a shared Google Drawing, and wegot our notebook table of contents and our first page started.
They weren't even freaked that they had homework the first day, with NINE. WHOLE...pictures.
All in all, I got the responses I wanted, and I feel like I got them to see what I was going for, maybe even a little buy-in--definitely some new Nicky Jam addicts.
So that's a peek into a day that could have been truly terrible given the circumstances. And here are a couple more peeks while we're at it!
 |
| Since I can't get rid of all of the college's tables, this is as close as I dared get to deskless--the mochila table worked pretty well. One of my colleagues even ended up copying me! |
 |
| Check out all of the meaning establishing I did! Question posters from Creative Language Class, a couple of my Essential Verbs, plus some posters I printed before planning to clarify some basics ahead of time, a la Linda Li. And just look at all of the meaning establishing I did on the fly! |