Lining up

Each time my grade 3 elves (how Kari and I affectionately refer to our ELL students) walk to/from their home room classroom to my ELL room (a walk from the second to third floors of our main ed building), I have the four of them order themselves in line by some creative patterning. By instructing them to line up in a specific order, we eliminate the issue of unfairness, pushiness, or favoritism when deciding who gets to stand in whatever position he/she desires on any given day. Furthermore, I also use the line up time as an opportunity to either get their sillies out, exercise their creativity, or also practice new vocabulary and critical thinking skills for ordering and organizational patterns (what's length, height, alphabetical order, and how do we determine degrees of distinguishing placement or position in the 4-person line?). Sometimes I think of a line-up rule, and some days I let the kids invent the ordering pattern. 

So far, we gave tried arrangements by: height, alphabetical order, birthdate, ROYGBIV rainbow-color-order based on any particular item of clothing, length of hair, scale of shiny to dull shoes (on a day when we had been studying the -SH- digraph (sound pronunciation) and shiny shoes were key vocabulary words in a read aloud acidity we had been working on), and the list goes on. 

Today we were trying and trying to think of something, and talking about what to measure (part of their geometry unit), so we lined up by length of nose. (See photo.) The elf with the shortest nose stood in front, sequentially progressing up to the elf with the longest nose. Though my nose length was not recorded, because they insist I march alongside them (which ultimately is good for monitoring behavioral issues anyway), I am certain I would have been at the back of the line, probably registering over 5cm in length. (5cm is a long nose for a very short elf!)

Whiteboard quick list for line up