Transcript

One of the activities we love to start our day with is a mystery question. And what we do is we have students find their name on a table and bring their name cards over to our question of the day. We help them read what the question of the day is, and they get to answer that question. For example, this question says "can you do a summersault?" So they would look at the three different answers, "yes", "no", or "I'm not sure" and they would place their name under their answer. The beginning of the year we like to start with first names, it's an excellent way to teach name recognition. Throughout the year we'll move to last names to get them to learn last names, and we'll also change the type of question that we ask. So, for example, this question is a yes or no, but we may change it to answer something like brothers or sisters, or mother, or father, so they're reading a lot of different words.

Another easy way is to create your own questions. So if you're doing a particular unit, you can just take a blank piece of paper, write your own question on something that the kids might know, slip it into the top and then create your own answers that they can answer. An extension to this activity is when we do attendance we'll have the students answer based on what their answer was to the morning message. For example, when we call Elijah's name, he will say "yes I can do a summersault". Then we would change it into a math lesson and we would talk about how many friends can summersault, how many friends said "no", and how many friends said "I'm not sure". The question of the day is an excellent strategy to have students recognize their own name. It's also a great way, when all the names are on the chart, for friends to be encouraged to write letters to other friends. They can come up and find their friend's name on the board, with teacher assistance, and they can take that friends name card over to their place and write a letter to them to mail in their special mailbox.