Four ESSENTIAL Things to Teach During the First Week of School
I finished my first day of 2nd grade!
The way my district structures the back to school season is that all teachers return on a Monday and have inservice/classroom work days from Monday-Thursday. The students started on Friday with a half day.
We will all return on Monday for a full week together!
I like starting with a half day and having a weekend to regroup. I can rearrange seats if I need to, or rethink some routines after meeting my students. Because we haven’t gotten far into the year at all, it’s easy to change my ideas before anything becomes too routine for my kids!
As I’m mapping out my first full week of school, I’ve been thinking a lot about WHAT exactly I want them to know by the end of this week.
We will do plenty of community building and fun, hands-on activities. But, embedded into those activities I have four essential things that I want to reinforce at every opportunity!
Essential #1: How to Take Care of Supplies
When you start a new year, and you’re collecting all of the supplies students bring in, it is essential to teach students how to care for them. It is wasteful to have all of these nice, new supplies, and carelessly drop them on the floor or leave caps off so things get dried out.
I will take time this week, as I am passing out supplies or we are doing activities, to teach students how I want them to care for those supplies. The key, in my opinion, is to always talk about WHY it’s important to take care of our stuff.
I’m teaching a lesson on caring for supplies out of the First Week Back Activity Pack!
Essential #2: How to Clean Up at the End of the Day
I love to maintain a level tidiness throughout the day, but a hard reset at the end of the day is SO great for a classroom community. I use my end of day jobs to give everyone a job at the end of the year. You can see my set up in this reel, or shop the cards on TPT here.
Essential #3: How to Transition
Everything from lining up to switching from one subject to another needs to be taught during the first week! There are several opportunities that organically come up to teach these transitional routines. Not teaching students your expectations for transitional times leads to chaos and loss of teaching time! So, it’s essential that you lay out all of those routines early.
Essential #4: How to Put Things Where they Go
I am a big believer in ‘everything has a place’. But, the key is that students need to know what those places are. If they need a new glue stick mid-lesson, how do they get one? If they are finished with a paper, where does it go? If they are NOT finished with a paper, but the lesson time is over, where does it go? All of those ‘places’ are so important to teach right off the bat!
What essentials do you teach during the first week of school?
