Nice to meet you. Let’s tell some lies.

1. My name is Kristin Roberts, a former colleague of Rachel, and an 8^th grade language arts (reading and writing) teacher in Phoenix, Arizona.
2. I am excited to embark on my 5^th year teaching middle school in a few short weeks, but I sure hope those weeks aren’t tooo short.
3. I’m eagerly planning to dive headfirst into my curriculum on the first day of school.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this isn’t Rachel. I’m excited to be guest blogging here. If I can’t work with Rachel at school everyday any longer, this will have to get me through. The list above is an example of an ice-breaker activity I do with my students each year. It’s one of the Kagan cooperative learning structures called Find the Fiction. Each person states 3 pieces of information about herself, and her teammates must guess which statement is fiction. (I’m tempted to embark on a tangential discussion about the trouble with gender-specific singular pronouns here, which I actually have a lot to say about. I’m a girl, so I’ll say herself and her.) Back on point, in my example, the third statement is fiction. I highly value my instructional minutes and do my best to spend them seeped in curriculum, but I believe the first 1-3 days of the year in middle school are better spent on team building and setting up procedures for how those teams will work. Aside from letting students get to know each other, activities like this give them a great picture of what appropriate communication should look like in your classroom. They learn to take turns, use appropriate volumes, listen and respond respectfully, and in my room, we thank our teammates daily.

Let me digress for a moment. (For realz this time --- I teach middle school. I have to say for realz, and I have to use lots of parentheses and ellipses because regular punctuation bores me.) I’d like to take a moment to properly introduce myself in a much more grown-up fashion. My first and second statements above are accurate, but let me flesh out my background a bit more because I love to talk about myself, and I’m sure you’ll find it quite fascinating. Right? Right. My original career ambition was to become an attorney. I earned a bachelor’s degree in pre-law several years ago from Cedarville University (Cedarville, Ohio), but I quickly learned that my passion was not the law. I soon returned to school, this time at Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan) to earn my teaching credentials. I am certified to teach secondary English language arts and history. In 2007, I moved to Arizona and started my career in teaching middle school language arts. Perhaps one day I’ll share the dark days of substituting that I’m skipping over in my introduction. I’m very thankful for my baptism by fire into the world of teaching, but I’m glad I don’t need to repeat those days. Unlike the law, teaching is my passion. I truly love what I do and am extremely driven to improve my practice. I care deeply for my students and want the best for them. And of course, I live for the hilarious incidents that happen daily in a middle school. The stories I could (do) tell! I will be sharing some of my lessons and strategies with you here on occasion, and I hope you find them useful.

So, Find the Fiction. Use it! It’s a wonderful ice breaker, but it’s also a great activity to reinforce learning. Have students list statements about your curriculum, including one fictional statement, of course, that their teammates will have to find. Whether you’re using it for a team builder or curriculum, please remember to explicitly model it as well as listing clear step-by-step directions on the board. Include details explaining how long students will have to talk, who talks first, how teammates should respond, and what you expect them to be able to produce or share when the activity is over. I like to end the activity with some whole-class sharing of interesting factual and fictitious statements. It’s fun, let’s you learn about your students, and honestly, fictitious is just an enjoyable word to say out loud. I’ll leave you to find my fiction . . . the three statements I shared with my students in 2010 for this activity:

1. My first job was at Baskin Robbins ice cream.

2. My favorite television show is American Idol.

3. I tried to learn hip hop dancing by watching Soulja Boy tutorial videos on YouTube.

Can you find my fiction?