Pom Pom Pal

I won 2 prizes today at the Summer Standards training and I NEVER win anything and you know how we teachers love, love, love free stuff, so I have to share them with you. The first prize I won was a bucket and a bag of different colored pom poms. Vanessa Ritter shared her idea of how she puts her students into groups or how they find their "Pom Pom Partner." Beforehand you decide how many you want in each group and put that many of the same color in the bucket, ex. If you want them to work in pairs, you would put 2 yellow pom poms in, 2 red pom poms in, etc. Then you go around the room and each student reaches in the bucket and pulls out a pom pom and holds it up and yells out the color they got so everyone can see and hear (When you model this, you act really excited and cheer about the color you get;).
Then when everyone gets a pom pom, you find your pom pom partner. When I got home, I couldn't remember what she had called them and I said Pom pom Pal and I think that is what I might say in my room. We read a Junie B. Jones book in which she writes a poem and calls her friends pals, so I think that will be a good connection for us. When I put my students in groups, I usually just number them off and that is so boring, so I am loving this Pom Pom idea. I took a picture of Mrs. Ritter's Pom Pom bucket. It is so cute with it's different colored polka dots to look like the pom poms. Hope you find this idea useful too! My other freebie was the book you see pictured, Strategies that Work.