It’s the 2nd week of classes and I am still in the stage of getting to know my pupils. It’s really challenging to get to know each of them since they’re almost 50 in my class. You wouldn’t expect me to know them deeply in just a span of few days, right? Imagine more or less 50 pupils with different personalities coming from different backgrounds and with different experiences. That’s a lot GTKY to do!
For this blogpost, I’ll be sharing to you one of the activities that I did in my first day of class. (Why just now? Because I got so busy with all the paperwork and I have a lot of pending blog posts to do, I wasn’t able to write about this last week.)
A day before the first day of class, I asked my followers of my Facebook page for some suggestions on how I can use these sweet chocolate-filled candy shells I bought to get to know my pupils. Some suggestions were given and I used one of these suggestions in my class.
So, on my Getting-to-Know-you activity, I followed this process:
- I placed these candies on a plate and I asked each of my pupils to get one candy. I told them to be careful in selecting the color because each color has a corresponding question. For example, if a pupil picked color yellow, he/she would need to say his/her name first and then answer the corresponding question “Where did you spend your summer vacation?” Again, each of the color has a corresponding question for the kids to answer.
- Once the pupil was done introducing his/her self and answering the question, that’s the time he/she can eat the candy.
- All the pupils must be attentive because there is the twist at the end which I did NOT announce before the activity started.
- What’s the twist? After all the pupils were done introducing themselves, a pupil who came in front and was able to say the correct names of 5 of his/her classmates (including the answers to the questions) got to eat all the remaining chocolate-filled candy shells on the plate!
Another variation is to group themselves according to the colors they have chosen and then once they are in their groups, they can take turns introducing themselves.
Any other suggestions?
Happy teaching!
Other helpful resources:
The Public School Teacher 