The first week of school is never dull. Fresh from summer vacation, flushed from the heat outdoors and the thrill of a new beginning, students file into classrooms humming with leftover energy from the break. They greet old friends with hugs and laughter and offer smiles to potential new pals. And then you, the teacher, step up to the front of the classroom, and they wait, expectant without quite knowing what to expect.
That first week is all about first impressions—both for you and for your students. Starting the school year off right goes a long way toward setting a positive tone for the rest of the year and forging strong connections. These “first week of school” lesson plans are the perfect way for you and your students to get to know one another and kick the year off on the right foot.
Lesson Plan #1: Introductory Interviews
Lesson Plan #1: Introductory Interviews
This fun lesson plan for the first week of school allows your 2nd grade students to get to know one another in more depth than more commonly used icebreaker activities. It’s also a great way to assess your students’ current capabilities while developing both their writing and social skills.
- First, provide your students with a short list of basic interview questions, such as “What is your name?” and “Where are you from?” Leave some space at the bottom of the list and ask your students to add 2-3 questions of their own.
- Then, have your students form random pairs. Ask them to swap papers and answer each other’s interview questions. When they’re done, have them give the completed worksheets back to the original authors.
- Ask your students to use the answers their partners provided to write short biographies. A student might write something like, “Today I met Johnathan Smith. He is from Tallahassee, Florida. His favorite color is blue…”
- Finally, ask your students to share their completed biographies aloud, introducing their partners to the class as if they are already friends.
PROJECT IDEA
This lesson plan can easily be turned into a fantastic collaborative class project! Once they’ve finished writing, have students sit so that they are facing their partners and ask them to draw portraits of one another to match their biographies. Have your students share both their biographies and their art before collecting and publishing their work in a unique hardcover classbook.
Lesson Plan #2: A Few of Our Favorite Things
Kids love to talk about their favorite things. This lesson plan for the first week of school gives you an opportunity to use that in order to help your students—even the shy ones—open up to you and to their classmates and build strong foundations of trust and understanding from day one.
- Begin with a simple warm-up exercise. Provide your students with a simple brainstorming worksheet. Ask them to fill it with as many of their favorite things as they can think of—everything from their favorite colors to their favorite pizza toppings or games to play.
- Once their worksheets are full of their favorite things, go around the room and ask each student to share their names and one of the items on their list. After each student introduces themselves and shares their favorite thing, ask the rest of the class to answer with a show of hands how many other students also like that thing. It’s a fun way of seeing who might share common interests, and it might even spark a few new friendships!
- When everyone is finished sharing, have your students write journal entries about the item they shared. Why is it their favorite? What do they like about it? Do lots of other students in the class also like it? How does that make them feel?
PROJECT IDEA
Before your students write their journal entries, provide them with simple framed sentences to help keep their thoughts organized and their responses structured. For example, they might read something like, “My name is ___ and my favorite ___ is ___. I like it because ___. As many as ___ other students in my class also like ___. This makes me ___, because ___.” After their journal entries are complete, ask them to peer edit each other’s work to make sure their spelling and sentence structure are on-point. Then, ask them to each draw an illustration representing their favorite thing. Finally, be sure to publish their writing and art in a professionally bound and published hardcover classbook!
Facilitating a Fantastic First Week
The thing I love best about coming back to school is seeing all the new faces in my classroom for the first time. A new year means a whole new batch of students to meet and new horizons to discover and explore. There’s so much creative potential waiting to be tapped into, so many academic adventures yet to be had. Thoughtful lesson plans like introductory interviews and discussing personal favorites make that first week of school memorable—especially if you publish them as classbooks!—but also set your students up for success by fostering a sense of community and creativity in the classroom from day one.
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Image sources: Lead image via Shutterstock; Images 1, 2 via OpenClipart.org