First Day of School Activities for Math Teachers

New and experienced math teachers can take advantage of first-day math activities.

Math teachers new and old may find difficulty in coming up with activities for the first day of math class. Often it may be awkward for the students to begin the first day of class with a math lesson, so you should consider some other options. Whether you want to maintain a serious tone or a fun tone, you can use some of these creative activities as a way to start your course.

Assessment Tests

In a new class, it is often difficult to tell the level of your students. Though you may be teaching a class and text you have taught before, the overall level of your students may change each year. One activity that is both suitable for the first day of class and suitable for your class planning after the first day is administering an assessment test. You can design an assessment for your students before the first day of class so that you will be able to obtain a good estimate of your class's level immediately.

Name Learning

On the first day of class, you are likely unfamiliar with your students' names. You can take advantage of the first day of class to learn all your students' names. One way to turn this activity into a math game is to assign points to letters. For example, "a" is one point, "b" is two points and so on. Have your students add up the values of their names. Afterwards, tell them to come to the board and write their name along with their name's value.

Seating Assignments

If you are a teacher who likes to assign seats to your students, then you can spend the first day of class assigning students to seats in a mathematical way. When students come into class, do not let them take a seat. Instead, hand them each a card with an equation on it. This equation should have a solution equaling the student's seat number. In this activity, you can alter the difficulty of the equations to give an assessment, review or preview of the class to students.

Riddles and Puzzles

A fun activity for math students on the first day of class is math questions in the forms of riddles and puzzles. As a teacher, you may already know some math riddles. If not, you can turn simple math problems into riddles. For example, you may provide simple arithmetic problems using difficult wording such as "multiply your toes by your fingers divided in half and add that result to the number of eggs in a carton."

References

• Math Forum: The First Day of School