When you come back to school right after winter break it can take a few days to get back into the swing of things. It’s kind of like the back to school season, except many things are already established. You still have to help students remember your procedures and break the ice with them again. This time around it most likely won’t take as long as it did back at the beginning of the school year. These 5 activities and strategies will help you start the new year off strong in your math classroom!
For some teachers, class lists change with new students entering and exiting due to schedule changes. Maybe you’re teaching a new subject area or your administration has added a course to your schedule. Or maybe everything is staying the same (lucky you!).
Just to add yet another wrinkle, during this crazy school year you may be shifting from one teaching model to another. If this is the case you’ll also have to establish new procedures for the new teaching and learning setting.
No matter what is changing or staying the same, the first week after winter break is a great time to re-establish good habits and continue to build a repoire with students. Read on for engaging activities to help you get back into the groove of learning math.
New Year’s Guesses and Wagers
New Year’s Guesses and Wagers can add a little fun to your math class during the first week back from winter break. We’ve used a similar game the day before Winter Break to challenge students to think critically even on a crazy day of school.
The New Year’s Guesses and Wagers is a whole class trivia game. When teaching in-person, you present the game through a projector. Students use paper pieces to generate answers and place their wagers.
When teaching online the game changes a little bit. Students play as individuals and choose between prepared multiple choice option. The distance learning version can easily be used through Zoom or other video-conferencing applications.
In this game students answer questions about New Year’s like, “How many Waterford Crystal triangles are on the Times Square Ball that drops on New Year’s Eve?” or “What percent of Americans are planning on making a New Year’s Resolution?” Working in teams, students try to make reasonable guesses and have a chance to wager points. If you prefer to have students play individually, there’s also a multiple choice option available.
The math in the game doesn’t review specific skills. It’s more about getting students to think and share ideas about the reasonableness of their answers. Playing this game when returning from break grabs student’s attention and gets them thinking about math again.
Review Growth Mindset
The idea that if you work hard at something, you can get better at it is something that serves students well in math class. That’s where teaching the Growth Mindset explicitly comes in. You might have talked about it at the beginning of the school year, but the week after winter break is my other favorite time of the year to review it.
We created a Growth Mindset Presentation to give students an introduction to growth mindset. You could use this presentation again even if you used it back in the fall. Most students could use a refresher and they don’t remember everything from the first time you presented it. This presentation can also be used through PearDeck or a similar program.
Also, I’d suggest using our Growth Mindset Escape Room. If your students are already very familiar with growth mindset, then this could be a stand alone activity. Otherwise it pairs perfectly with a brief introduction presentation. It definitely is challenging and gives students a chance to show their growth mindset while learning about Growth Mindset. How very meta!
Daily Would You Rather Questions
I know of many teachers who use “Would you rather…?” questions at the beginning of class. Theresa used them as the first thing students answered upon entering her classroom. It lowers students’ walls a little bit because there is no right or wrong answer and the questions are quirky and random. Most students in middle school love to be a little (or a lot) random.
This might seem like a little thing, but you’ll get some kids’ attention and participation from the start of class with these questions. It gives you a chance every day to share a little bit about yourself and share your personality with your students. We have a full-year set of these types of questions prepared, or you can create your own.
Add Some Fun Math Review
Our brains need to review concepts if we want to retain them. The first week after break is a great time to reinforce concepts from earlier in the year. You can do this review in a fun way through mazes, escape rooms, knockout games, bingo, or riddles related to concepts you’ve already learned this year.
Want to try out a free math maze today? Sign up for the Maze of the Month club and get a free maze on middle school math concepts sent right to your inbox each month. Each maze has 2 versions- a printable & a digital version built in Google Slides (perfect for whatever your classroom looks like!) Plus, you’ll get an adding and subtracting integers maze right away.
YES! Sign me up for the Maze of the Month Club!
I like to choose some of the topics that are prerequisites for topics we’ll be learning in the second semester to review. An example of this is reviewing square roots and equations from the 1st semester to be ready to learn about the Pythagorean Theorem.
You could choose a series of mazes, riddles, and escape rooms and let students decide which ones to complete in stations or centers. Also, you could set it up like a path and have students work their way through different activities.
Another fun way to review is a knockout game (read more in this post). This whole class review game works great to get students participating. They’ll get back to doing math as soon as you start the game. Knockout games work for in-person and synchronous virtual learning as well.
Goal Setting
January works as the perfect time to review goals that were made at the beginning of the school year. If you didn’t make goals at the beginning of the year, then right now is the perfect time to try it out.
My biggest tips for goal setting is to make sure that goals are measurable. “Get better at math.” is a goal that’s hard to know when it’s achieved. Students are masters at creating vague goals. We can help them by giving them examples and goal starters.
Examples:
-I will improve from the pretest to the posttest on the first unit.
-I will always be up to date in my math notebook.
-This semester I will ask the teacher one math question per week.
You can have students write or type their goals in their notebook in a prominent place like the first page or the last page. This makes it easy to review them periodically. Also, it helps if you as the teacher writes a goal alongside the students. This gives you an opportunity to model your thinking, failing, succeeding, and reviewing goals.
It’s Time to Go Back to School and Rock the Rest of the Year
By spending some time during the week back after winter break to re-establishing routines, relationships, and mindset you’ll set yourself and your students up for more success for the rest of the year.
Remember that there are seasons throughout the school year. Finding the right rhythm for the ebbs and flows of the school year makes teaching and learning go more smoothly. Good luck out there, and Happy New Year!
