At the beginning and end of the week we have advisory in the morning for about 10 minutes. I know advisory is supposed to be like a home-base for students and it is a nice connection for them, especially at the beginning of the year. I go over announcements with the students and words of the day, and I focus on grades at mid and end quarter. We will also do some sharing about weekends and sometimes play some games. But I feel as the year goes on that Advisory gets monotonous. Does anybody do any other activities with their advisory? Any other ideas for things to do with students that are fun and meaningful, but don’t take too much prepping?
Ahem, 15 minutes!
ReplyDeleteLaura, I struggled a lot last year to make it meaningful. I find that students really like hearing about things going on in the world. Last year, when the tsunami hit Japan, they really wanted to know more. And when Bin Laden was killed, we talked about that as well. Whenever a major world, national, or local event occurs, it is really easy to ask students what they know about it, what they found interesting, and perhaps give your own insight as well. I know that as a social studies teacher, this is pretty much part of my job but I've also found it to be an interesting and educational time where students get involved with the world around them. For ideas, CNN student news is a good place to start.
My apologies Eric and everyone...15 minutes for Advisory!!! :)
ReplyDeleteWe have advisory too and at times it can be very long. What I do is go over grades with students and let them know areas they need to focus on. Another thing I like to do with my advisory is triva. www.sporcle.com/games has tons of trivia games the students can choose from. Another news channel is channelone.com. Hope that helps!
ReplyDeleteI have advisory in the cafeteria and we can hardly hear announcements! So it's hard to really connect with students when you can't hear them and I don't have a computer. So I have done some games:
ReplyDelete4 square--they have to go to four places for either math, English, Social Studies or Science--or 4 corners of the room--and go to their favorite subject and ask them to tell why it is--and then look--the room will likely be divided into 4 almost evenly--tell them that's what makes the world go round--people having different interests--have them share what kinds of careers they could do with those favorite subjects
Line them up by birthday and then time them with stopwatch
Line them up for anything and time them--alphabetically first name, last name, middle name
Last year I went to YouTUBE for favorite videos that had a good message.
Find as many things as they can from a penny
GOOD LUCK!
I like that my team has decided to do minute to win it games at the team meetings. Then we practice and nominate one kid (or pair of kids depending on the activity)per advisory to represent the advisory. This is nice. I have a smartboard, so I usually play games with them, but not everyone has that.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've thought about doing is having kids do charades or catch phrase.
I like Eric's idea because many kids have no idea what is going on in the news, and they think it's not their concern.
This concern is why I think that we should do work with social development during this time. Someone could write curriculum for everyone (this is what they do at the high school) and we could discuss issues like bullying. The schoolwide nature would also add legitimacy to the activities. We did this at the school I student taught at and it worked well I thought.
I am in charge of Advisory/Homeroom now at the high school. It has been hard to plan for activities for everyone but we also only meet two times a month. I think it would be benieficial to have certain days be different activities. Like Mondays is reading day, Friday is activity day, Wednesday, we play games, ect. I can understand how it would be hard to have something every day, but maybe haveing a schedule across the building would help!
DeleteMy adivsory is all of my DCD students. On one hand it is nice because I get to touch base with them on things that need to get done, field trips, etc. They really benefit from having a home base. Next year, though, I really want to have a "partner advisory" that we maybe meet with once a month. It would give my kids a chance to get to know their general education peers better, and would give the gen. ed kids a chance to see some of the special aspects of my students!
ReplyDeleteOh, and Connie, I like the idea of having some sort of curriculum to base what we are doing off of!!! :) That seems like it would be really beneficial to everyone!
ReplyDeleteAt the junior high, we have advisory every day for 15 minutes. One thing I have done this year and last that has been such a big help with making the time interesting for the kids-is that I have put them in four different teams. We do team challenges twice a week where their teams can earn points. We have a scoreboard in the room and at the end of the semester the team with the most points gets a prize. This helps make things interesting and build relationships between students.
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