Do any of you use Kagan strategies in your room?? It's all about cooperative learning - team work and partners and building a classroom family, if you will. One of my favorite things that I took away from Kagan is the desk assignments... He makes a mat, but I found the mat to be just in the way and got beat up...so I made little labels that I tape to the desks.
I used to have desk pockets taped to all the desks....
(The desk pockets are part of my classroom decor packs! This one is in the
Blue & Green Chevron pack)
Inside their desk pocket is their behavior card (which is blank because school had not started yet. But you can read about how I do my behavior cards at
THIS post. But WAIT until after you read the rest of this post before leaving...or make sure you come back! lol).
I also put in their team job cards into the pocket. I copy off each team onto a different color. I have up to 5 jobs per team, but I try to only have 4 people to a group (it's a Kagan training reason), so I usually don't use the materials job and just have my team leaders do that one. Some of the ideas are from the Kagan strategies - what they say to use for jobs, but I changed a few to "match" my room better.
If you want them, click the pick below to snag them for free.
But now, at this school, we all have to use the clip chart dealy-bob...so I have the personal ones from Rachel...which you see sticking up behind my name tags.
By the way, I made those name tags and you can download them for FREE in {
THIS} post!
So now I don't really need the pockets on my desk anymore, because I can just make all my 1s the Team Leader for the day/week and all my 2s for Material people for the day/week. I have the labels taped to the desks, going around so that they go in a circle.... here's a better "bird's eye view" of what I mean.
Now, with Kagan, your supposed to have groups of 4. And in my perfect world, I would LOVE to have only 16 kids for the WHOLE. ENTIRE. YEAR.
4 groups of 4.
An even number.
Be still my heart.
But, alas, that doesn't always happen...
So this is what we do when we have odd numbers...or can't make another group of 4.
The A and B on the labels is for partner working.... the shoulder partner and face partner will always be opposite, one will always be A and one will always be B. So when you are working together on something, you can say "Partner A will start and then partner B," or vice versa. I like to mix it up.
The C people!? Well, hopefully, you have 2 C people and they can then always partner up. If not, no worries! Because you KNOW you always have someone absent...so my 1 C person is my floater. They don't mind. They like it. They get to move around. And they love that!
The training that we had said that they would rather us have 2 groups of 3, than a group of 6, because a group of 6 is too many for small group cooperation. I get it. I like it.
So I decided instead of using the square mat, I made my own cute little labels to go on their desks. And I made them in group colors, so I can call the "red" group down to the floor, and then the "blue" group. I don't have remember who is in it. I don't need to remember who is team captain either because I can just say "1s, please come get the papers" or "3s, please go the get the offices."
It's brilliant. I don't need to remember who is where, and I like it that way!
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