Welcome Back Ranum

It's hard to believe that two and half weeks have already gone by. It's been awesome getting to know the mentor's and mentee's more and more each day and watching them get to know one another. The first week we focused on initial relationship building through ice breakers, discussed why students are either a mentor or mentee, and started to shape what we want our classroom culture to look like.

We did a great teambuilding activity called Spaghetti Towers where groups of students had to try and design either the tallest, most stable, or most creative tower out of spaghetti and mini marshmallows. The students had to work together, communicate, and come up with a plan on how they wanted to build their structure. Fun was had by all and it was exciting watching their thought process and seeing all of their creative ideas.

This past week, in my classes that have an even number of mentor's and mentee's, we started the matching process through an activity called Speed Matching. Speed Matching had mentor's lined up sitting next to each other and mentee's would rotate through each mentor to ask questions and converse. Students were given some questions to spark their conversations or they had the freedom to ask questions that were important to them. Now, the student's will have to nominate their top 3 choices for mentor or mentee and provide a solid case why they should be paired up. I'm looking forward to what they will come up with!