"So Fricken Stumped to See, the First Day of School!" Another First Day Activity

Something else that I generally do the first day and maybe the second day is to have posters with questions for students to put on post-it notes responses about how they want our class to be and responses about their goals for the year.  I found these questions from this blog:  Middle School Math Rules and adapted them for my science classroom.  I have done this the last few years with both 7th & 8th grade and then I have compiled results into a Wordle or similar app to create posters based on the responses.  Last year, I wanted to change things up a bit for 8th grade so they weren't doing the same exact questions, so it worked out well when last year these popped up in my Twitter feed:  5 Questions to Ask Your Students .  Students did ok with those, though even with prompting, they had issues with "What is one BIG question you have for this year?," or it might be more accurate to say that they acted like the junior high students that they are.  😀 I may adjust these a bit.  This was a list that I also saved around the same time last year 6 Questions to Ask Your Students ; the lists are very similar but I may swap out questions from the lists.