A Fresh New Year!

This year I'm lucky enough to be teaching year 9 students who I had when they were in year 7, and it's so exciting to see how much they have matured over the years. This week we set ourselves up for success by...

Setting individual goals for the term

Students in year 9 are generally quite grade-focused in Sweden, as it is their last year in mandatory education, and they will be applying to high schools with their grades at the end of the year. I make a point at the beginning of the year to have students do a self-reflection on what they achieved last year, what they want to achieve this year, and creating an action plan for reaching their goals. This gets students from "I'm going to work hard." to concrete actions that will actually support their development. We'll be checking in once per month on the goals, and students will reflect on if they are taking the actions they planned to take, and if not, why not.

Setting additional unit objectives as a class

This term we are working with the theme "Crime and Punishment". While the novel of the same name is a bit out of most of their reach for now, we are working with the concepts related to crime and punishment both in literature (we'll be reading Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) and in reality. I had set my own objectives for the unit, of course, but it's important to hear from the students about what they want to get from the unit, and what they feel they need to work on most. Two topics came from the class that I had not anticipated myself: spelling and pronunciation. We worked together as a class to set an objective for each of these. Getting them involved like this really sets them up to be engaged in the work all term.

Preparing our notebooks with tabs

I saw this idea from the "Math in the Middle" blog and was excited to use the free template, adjust it to my class's needs and try it out this year because flipping through notebooks filled up haphazardly by students is so time consuming (and one thing a teacher really doesn't have is time to waste!). I was pleasantly surprised by how happy the students were to be organizing their notebooks! I prepared tabs for them for three sections - one for Warm Ups (which we do at the start of each lesson), one for Writing Practice, and one for general Notes. Each tab includes instructions and reminders for each section, which will be an excellent reference point throughout the year.