23 All About Me Activities For Middle Schoolers - Teaching Expertise (2024)
Middle school years are hard in general, so finding ways to get to know your students is very important! With students this age, it is best to try and think outside the box. Engage them with fun activities in the first few weeks of school to help with relationship building. There are many ways to pull in the curriculum with these activities like creative writing activities and school math ideas. Enjoy this list of 23 inspiring ideas with your middle schoolers!
1. The Best Part of Me
This is a great alternative to the same old, what is your favorite color or favorite food writing activity? This is where students pick the best part of themselves, write about why, and include a photograph. This is a great way to get to know students and encourage them to discover how they see themselves.
This is a creative spin on a traditional writing activity for upper elementary or middle school students. Students will draw a selfie, or even print a photo, and write about themselves. This is a great option for the first weeks of school or even as a reflection activity throughout the year.
Icebreakers are a great option for the start of the school year. This cool icebreaker is a good one to use as it will get students up and moving and mingling with everyone! They have to seek out students who fit the category of what they are looking for and speak with many different students in the process.
Trade in the writing prompts for something a little more creative, like this All About Me bag activity. These can also serve as good classroom icebreakers and provide a way for students to connect with each other and bond over similar preferences.
Creating digital collages lets students relax and open up about what they like and enjoy doing. The digital version of the collage is a great way to allow students more experience in the digital world whilst using digital resources.
Partner chats are an underrated resource in the classroom. Instead of a traditional writing prompt, use these in-person chats to allow students to interact with each other. They can talk about themselves and have their partner introduce them to the rest of the class.
This writing activity will build classroom community by strengthening your bond with your students. This is an awesome idea to use with students who are shy. They can write things they wish their teacher knew. This is a humble and interesting activity.
Having students think about themselves is always an interesting task. Asking them to write words to describe themselves may be challenging for them. Help students use a thesaurus and get creative with words that help paint a picture of themselves.
Turn get-to-know-you activities into a fun game. Have groups play against each other and write clues about themselves and have the teacher guess the correct group to unlock the box. This will be fun to watch students keep a secret until the truth is unlocked!
This can be tweaked to be a better fit for middle school, but the base of the activity will remain the same. Create a simple list to let students share things about themselves. Simply let them list their favorite things and share them with others.
Finding a friend is a great activity for students of all ages. Use the editable version to tailor the options to fit your middle schoolers. This will get your middle school class up and moving. Students can spend the first few days of school getting to know their peers by finding students that fit within the categories they need.
Give your students a class or school survey at the start of the year. You could also give a learning styles survey that students complete to help you understand more about how they like to learn. This is good for any middle school class or content area.
Middle schoolers may scoff at a typical glyph, but this activity takes it one step further into the artistic realm. Students can get creative by designing a pennant that reflects them and their preferences and personalities. Upper elementary students may enjoy this as well.
Use colored Jenga blocks to play this get-to-know-you game so students can tell you all about themselves. They answer questions based on the color block they remove.
Now, this is an all-about-me activity that serves many purposes for the teacher! Teachers can see how students feel about learning and what they prefer and don’t care for. They can read detailed statements and sort them based on how they feel about each one- in turn creating a very informative learning styles inventory.
For a completely different twist on all-about-me activities, let middle school math students do a math-about-me project! Challenge them to think about their lives outside school to find different ways to use numbers to create this project.
Creating collages is a great way to let students be creative in expressing themselves. This art activity is great for getting into those middle school students’ thoughts by seeing the things they like and enjoy. Students can include photos, pictures from magazines, and even their own artwork.
Be sure to pencil in some time in your lesson plan to allow students to decorate their writing notebooks at the start of the year. This is good for them to express themselves and decorate, using an all-about-me format, but it can also be used as inspiration when writing throughout the year.
Trade in traditional autobiographies for this writing assignment which contains a twist. This project may take a bit of time, but it will be well worth it! Have students interview each other to learn more about the other and then have them turn that into a biography of the other person.
Pencil in some extra time to let students use their favorite colors and get artistic with this project. Replace the traditional school survey with a fun art project like this one that allows students to express themselves through art!
Whether in middle school or elementary school, this is a fun activity to replace the same old get-to-know-student information sheet from the beginning of the school year. This school printable will be a hit for sure and will make an adorable school bulletin board!
Another fun art project is this graffiti-themed activity that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser- even for your middle schoolers! Doing this in the first days of school can help you get students excited for other fun activities whilst learning more about them in the process.
This is not just any old students’ information sheet. Middle school students love social media and this is a great PDF file to print and use with students to get to know more about them.
An All About Me theme is a celebration of each student, including their culture, their race, their abilities, and the unique characteristics that make them who they are. It is important for every student to see themselves all over the classroom in the books, posters, art supplies, and toys.
When creating your presentation, remember the Rules of Seven. Your favorite movies • Your favorite actors • Your favorite actresses • Your favorite places to eat • Places or cities you've visited • Favorite sports • Favorite colors • Things I like about school: favorite subjects, etc.
In eighth grade, kids start to make sense of new words by looking at the words and sentences around them. Eighth-grade math includes multi-step word problems that use whole numbers, decimals, fractions, and percentages all at once.
The physical design of a developmentally appropriate classroom allows for experiences in areas for reading, writing, listening, dramatic play, art, numeracy, block, science, technology and an area for large group meetings.
Besides this, puzzles, games, role play, skits, story-telling, demonstrations using real objects, taking students on an educational tour, playing a subject-related video, and showing a documentary in the classroom are all examples of activity-based learning/teaching methods.
Game Rules. Make sure you explain the game to the group before you begin playing. Each person tries to figure out which famous person they are by only asking “Yes” or “No” questions to gain clues about the name that is on their back or forehead.
Brainstorm ideas. Before you begin the writing process, brainstorm ideas for what to incorporate into the personal statement, including accomplishments, strengths and skills. ...
Introduce yourself. ...
Highlight your achievements, skills and strengths. ...
The Silent Teacher technique involves a teacher modelling how to do something – its basically teaching without talking using examples instead of words. It's particularly effective when first introducing a concept.
The Daily 5 is a structure for learning. It has 5 components that can be taught daily: 1) read to self, 2) read to someone, 3) listen to reading, 4) word work, and 5) writing.
Benefits of testing the four skills (reading, listening, writing and speaking) When we say that someone 'speaks' a language fluently, we usually mean that they have a high level in all four skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Reading with a purpose, knowing when it's important to understand every detail and when she can read quickly for pure enjoyment. Reading selectively, scanning chapter headings and introductory sentences to find necessary information. Skimming a chapter in a textbook to form an overall impression.
Teachers at the middle school level specialize in specific subject areas, and within these subjects they often teach multiple courses. Part of their job description is to teach lessons based on their specialization. For example, if you specialize in math, you might teach courses like geometry or algebra.
Eighth-graders learn to read and understand essays, speeches, biographies, and other types of historical, scientific, and technical material. Students also read and understand a wide range of literature, such as stories, plays, and poems from across cultures and time periods.
In eighth grade, kids experience a massive boost in brain growth that results in enhanced abilities in problem solving, deductive reasoning, abstract thinking, strategic planning, and impulse control.
Social Development: Adolescents often are building their adult personalities, basic values and attitudes during 8th grade. They also are seeking autonomy and independence, while also reaching out to peers for friendship and camaraderie.
All About Me is a great theme for the beginning of the school year to help students develop a positive self-image and feel confident and comfortable in the classroom. Explore these All About Me activities that encourage children to discover what is unique about them and their classmates.
The "What's My Name?" game focuses on building early phonetic awareness and spelling skills. Students are encouraged to make connections among letters, sounds, and words while participating in this active game.
Activities involving both the self (I) and the body There are some activities that we do, in which both 'I' and body are involved. The decisions and choices are made in 'I', and these are carried out via the body. These activities are: Walking Eating Talking Seeing Listening Take the example of eating.
The goal behind an All About Me Preschool Activities Theme is to help children learn about each other and each others' families! So, this is really an All About Me and My Family Theme Page! The theme helps children to realize that every person is unique and special.
Build Self-Esteem: Use the All About Me activities to have students reflect upon what makes them special. By recognizing characteristics that make them unique, students develop a sense of self-worth.
The teacher recognizes that each student is a unique individual who brings a lot to the table and writing about themselves helps them develop a sense of self-worth. It's also a great way for the teacher to connect with their students in a more personal way that can deepen relationships more easily.
In this project, students learn about each others' names, explore name meanings and related family stories, and brainstorm strategies for respectfully approaching unfamiliar names. Finally, students create artistic plaques to display their names within their cultural or personal contexts.
Typically everyone stands in a circle and the first person says their name, the next person says their own name and the name of the first person, and the third person says their own name, the name of the second person, and the name of the first person, and so on. Can you imagine how the last person in the group feels?
Each person tries to guess which famous person or animal they are by only asking “Yes” or “No” questions to gain clues about the name that is on their forehead. on the computer screen, as this will spoil the fun. Players may ask any question that can be answered by Yes or No.
According to Mead, three activities develop the self: language, play, and games. Language develops self by allowing individuals to respond to each other through symbols, gestures, words, and sounds.
Activities like imagining, dreaming, thinking, choosing, understanding etc. take place in Self. Activities like running, walking, eating, seeing, smelling, listening etc. take place with the involvement of Body and I.
In this game, one person thinks of something and then other players ask up to 20 yes/no questions to help them figure out what thing the other person is thinking of. The 20 questions game doesn't require any materials or preparation, which makes it a great activity to play in class.
Introduction: My name is Corie Satterfield, I am a fancy, perfect, spotless, quaint, fantastic, funny, lucky person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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