First Week Survival & Toothpaste

So, I survived the first week of school!!!  I'm so glad we have a 3 day weekend because this was quite possibly the longest week of my LIFE!!!  I have a great group of kiddos, so I'm super lucky.  However, I have several friends who struggle with schedule changes and often get very anxious if our routine is thrown off.  Talk about our routine being thrown off this week...I think we had only 1 day this week that we didn't have any interruptions.  I'll be glad to get back to NORMAL.

Most of the week was going over procedures and rules, but we did spend some time building our classroom community.  There was one activity that I just loved!  I wish I could claim it as mine, but it was the genius idea of Ms. O @ Ms. O Knows

It's called the Toothpaste Activity....yes, you use toothpaste!

It works like this...

Materials:
Several tubes of toothpaste (dollar store)
Tooth picks
Paper plates
baby wipes

Split the students into groups and tell them that they will have 5-10 minutes to squeeze out all the toothpaste in the tube onto a paper plate.  Then they must use toothpicks to put the toothpaste back into the tube. (WARNING-it's really messy and suggest having baby wipes on hand for each group)

After a few minutes or once they realize that it's impossible to do, discuss how sometimes our words are like that toothpaste.  Once they leave our mouth, you can't put them back.  So, be mindful of what you say to others & think before you speak because you can't put the words back...just like they couldn't put back the toothpaste back into the tube.

Then we brainstormed some words/phrases that would be considered toothpaste words and encouraged the students NOT to use toothpaste words.

Check out Ms. O's activity here for more in depth explanation, but I think it was a huge success.  Also, this could be a good activity to do after the new year as a reminder of using kind words.

Here are some pictures of the activity I did in my class...