As a student, I still remember my first day of fifth grade. I was new to school after moving that summer from the city to the suburbs. My previous school was a small school with one class at each grade level.
My new school had five sections of fifth grade. Being shy, I would never consider directly asking a person’s name. Instead, to learn my classmate’s names, I listened carefully to match names to faces and glanced often at desk tags.
Every fall I still feel like that 10 year old, scrambling to learn each person’s name as quickly as possible. I want each student to walk away from the first day of school knowing their teacher and most of their classmates know their name. So, the getting-to-know-you games and activities are as much for me as they are for the students.
An activity I’m going to use the first week of school is Name Bingo. I created Bingo cards with the Mailbox Gold Toolkit. To play, each student receives a Bingo card and counters. When I call a person’s name, the person will stand up and wave. Later in the week I may ask students to say something about themselves, but the first day I want to keep it as nonthreatening as possible. The first person to get five counters in a row wins a small prize.
To create the Bingo cards, I went to the Mailbox Gold Toolkit and clicked on Lotto Board Maker. From there, I customized the boards. I selected the layout, number of boards, border, and style (font, size, color). Then, I titled the boards and typed in each student’s first name. (Note: Make sure to add a comma after each name. The first time I tried it I hit the return key and the program thought all the names were one long word.) The Lotto Board Maker made 30 unique boards, and teacher cards to call during the game.
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