Planning The First Week of School

I don’t know about you, but in planning the first week of school I always preferred to be overplanned and overprepared – you never know what can happen! The beginning of the year is so exciting – setting up your classroom, preparing resources, and looking forward to getting to know your new students. One step that will give you confidence as you walk into your first day of school is organisation!

This blog post features a wonderful freebie with sets of question prompts and checklists to ensure you have considered and thought through your first week of school. These lists are not exhaustive, but are definitely a good starting point!

Free Back to School Planning Guide

Use this practical free resource to help with planning the first week of school. This resource looks at:

Practical things you need to consider for the beginning of the year
Your classroom set up
Classroom rules and procedures

Keep reading to get yours today!

In your first weeks of school, it is vital that you clearly (and repeatedly) communicate and model your expectations for various classroom rules and procedures. Our comprehensive lists will ensure you have thought through a range of rules and procedures so that you can plan how you will explain these to your students. You can read more about this in our blog post, “What I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching”.

Tips for Planning Your First Week of School

Before you download this useful freebie, I just thought I would give you three quick tips for planning your first week of school. I could think of far more, but hey, I don’t want to keep you here forever!

1. Plan some art for the first week of school.

This is great for three reasons:

An art activity gives you a chance to chat with all of your students individually as they are working on their artwork.
Art themed around “getting to know you” can help you and your students to get to know each other.
By the end of the first week, you can have the artwork displayed on your classroom wall or bulletin boards.
- Check out our Getting to Know You Collaborative Puzzle Posters. I highly recommend these are your first-week art project!

2. Plan your first day down to the minute!

The first day will FLY BY! In what feels like minutes, it will be 3 o’clock and you will be sitting in an empty classroom wondering where the time went. To ensure you cover what you want to cover on day one, ensure you have a detailed plan in place. Now I am definitely a Type A personality, so I always had a clipboard and a checklist in place e.g. by the end of the first day, these are the things I want to have explained to the students. It is also handy because if you check off your list, you know what you didn’t get to, and you can cover this on day two!

3. Organise some ice-breaker or team building activities.

When students first file into your classroom, they may not be familiar with each other and some short games to break the ice are a handy way to settle all of the nerves (yours included!). Ice-breaker or team building activities are also a way to start observing how students work together and particular students you may need to keep an eye on.

Check out our Team Building activities for step by step activity suggestions for the first weeks of school.

Get Your Free Back to School Planning Guide

You can get your Back to School Planning Guide by signing up for our email newsletter. Once you do this, you’ll gain access to our Freebie Library with over 50 FREE resources, including this great planning guide. Sign up here.

Digital Back to School Activities

Go paperless with our “Getting to know you” digital activities for Google Classroom. Start off the Back to School season in style with these dynamic, engaging and interactive activities – great for the first day of school activities. Get to know your elementary students and learn about their thoughts, feelings, and favorites with this great “All About Me” activity! The purpose of this resource is to capture who your students are right now and to get to know your students from day 1. Click here to get yours today.

Back to School Starter Kit

Our Back to School Starter Kit contains everything you need to get your classroom set up and ready for day one. This resource includes classroom decor and display materials, literacy and social studies activities, early finishers and team building activities, and more!

Print, photocopy and laminate these resources and then put your feet up knowing you are ready for day one! You’ll also save with our generous discount (25% off!). See more here.