Although the first week of school is still a little while away, we know you’re on the lookout for fun and engaging lessons to share with your class! This school year may look a little different, but you can still plan a ton of awesome first-day activities! The best part? These activities work whether you’re teaching at school or via distance learning!
Fun First-Day Activities
To help you out, we’ve put together five of our favorite first-day activities that can be shared with students wherever they are! Your students will love becoming part of the class family with these fun and engaging activities to welcome them on the first day of school.
#1 Summer Snapshot
Students love to share what they’ve done over the summer!
While they can’t catch up with their new classmates in person, they can still share what they’ve been up to with our Summer Snapshots template.
If students don’t want to illustrate, they can cut out photos of what they did! Once they’ve finished the suggested drawing prompts, they can create some of their own original hashtags to share with the class.
#2 In This Class We…
If you really want your class to work as a team this school year, then you need to work together to form behavior expectations for the year.
Using our In This Class… – Expectations Posters, encourage your students to write down what each of these things means to them:
- excellence
- respect
- kindness.
Then, use their responses to create a wonderful classroom display!
Your students will love that they’ve already contributed to a whole-class activity. Even better, they will be motivated to demonstrate the class expectations as they will have a clear understanding of what these expectations mean.
#3 Getting to Know You T-Shirt
Of course, it’s not all about learning what your students like at school. You can’t have first-day activities without getting to know your students’ interests out of school too!
This awesome Getting to Know You T-Shirt activity is just the creative lesson you need to get your students to share their interests.
Have the class introduce themselves to each other by sharing their T-shirts! They may find some new friends who share common interests that will set them up for the year to come.
#4 Would You Rather? Writing Task
Lastly, a good ol’ fashioned writing task!
There’s nothing like asking a student’s opinion to get them writing. You can do just that with our fun Would You Rather…? Question Cards!
Provide your students with a card to prompt them to write an opinion piece, or better yet – a story!
We have tons of writing templates, such as this Narrative Writing Planning Template. Give one to your students and see what creative stories they can come up with.
Oh yeah, don’t forget this will help you assess their handwriting, spelling, and narrative writing skills too! It’s a win-win!
Comments