From: Kimberley (for Teacher2Teacher Service)
Date: Aug 22, 2001 at 12:41:09
Subject: Re: First day of school - High School

At a high school the first day is dictated a lot by "the office".  We
generally have about 20-25 minutes with each class. With students who haven't
had me before I try to hit the highlights of my expectations, which are also
on a syllabus each student receives. Students read the various parts aloud so
they are participating right away. For each class I have an activity planned
which (hopefully) relates to something we'll be doing in the first chapter.
This activity also establishes the first groups the students will work in.

My favorite first day activity is one I use in my calculus class. To emphasize
the verbal, visual, analytic, and numeric representations we'll be using, each
student picks a card as they enter the room. It might have a description of a
function (cubic, periodic, etc.), a graph, an equation, or a table of values.
A group of 4 is formed when the students whose cards represent the same
function find each other. This idea could be used in other classes as well, by
the type of functions chosen.

 -Kimberley, for the T2T service

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