Managing First Lesson of the Year.

School begins this Monday and I am very, very excited to see my kids again. I bet they have all grown inches! First day lessons could become a struggle for beginning teachers. We may find ourselves in a new class with a new set of learners. Most of the time, these learners are not even ready to learn and seem to still be in their vacation modes.

However, I believe that we could overcome these challenges and conduct a simple reading activity on the very first day itself. Here are my plans for Monday:

1. Greet learners and have a sharing session about the holidays. On the whiteboard, write out names of places of interests that they may have visited as well as activities that they may have done (e.g fishing, swimming, painting). Put the nouns and verbs in different columns to encourage understanding of word class.

2. Discuss plans for year 2009. I will set my expectations and write them on the board, in short phrases. For example, I may write "talk softly" or "hand-in homework on time". Learners will then add to the list, setting their own goals and expectations for year 2009. Keep the expectations between five to eight.

3. I will explain to learners that when people make a promise to do something, they usually have to put it in black and white. I will then write my pledge for the class for the year 2009. For example, I may write, "This year, I will take 5R on a picnic once a month." I will then put this on a piece of paper and put my thumb print on it, to ceremoniously seal the promise.

4. In their exercise books, learners will write their pledges for the year. For example, "This year, I will read one story book every week." They may make two or three pledges before putting their thumb prints on the pages.

By the end of this lesson, the learners would have read five to six phrases and attempted to write two or three full sentences. The words and sentences from this lesson are practical words that they commonly hear in their daily lives (how many times in a year do we say "Talk softly!" or "Hand-in your homework!"? Countless!) so why not make them see the words in print?

VARIATION:
The above activity is set for my year 5T and 5R classes. For the younger children, I will discuss with the children and let them decide on a set of expectations and acceptable behaviours. I will then write these out on a manila card and allow all the children to put their thumb prints on the card. We will then read aloud the pledges.

For example:

"We will try to talk softly"
"We will try to hand in our homework on time"
"We will try to bring our books to school"

The learners may not be able to read all the words, but at least by the end of the lesson, they would already be able to read the phrase "We will try" and other familiar words like "talk" "homework" "time" "books" and "school". Five words in total is not bad for a low proficiency class!

All the best for your first day!