Another school year is upon us, and like many, we have been thinking a lot about school over the summer. As veteran teachers, the beginning of the school year still feels like our first year of teaching: the frantic back to school shopping for classroom supplies, the set up and organization of our classrooms, time spent preparing our first week’s lessons, and the meeting of the students on the first day.

As we head back to school in late August, we thought it would be helpful to post our Top 5 Back to School “Must Do” activities. We know that most have your own routines, but we hope that we can help get you in “teacher mode” for the school year!

Starting day one, the students need to respect you as the teacher. Notice we say “teacher” not “dictator” or “disciplinarian.” We use simple techniques right away the first day of class. When the students come in, we use a hand in the air gesture, and take a stopwatch and time how long it takes them to be quiet. No matter how long it took, we always tell them the time, and that they beat the classroom from last year. Starting off with a successful experience helps to build a rapport with the students. We also use a verbal signal if they are talking in groups and need to stop for directions. A simple repetitive clap works well for this. Besides the verbal and non-verbal calls for attention, you also will want to model your expectations for the class as well. The sooner the students learn the expectations, the better as far as classroom management.

One of the most important parts of our first week of school is creating classroom beliefs with our students. We want the students to take ownership as contributing members of the class. In order to do this, we have discussions the first few days about what rules that they have at home and what rules we should have at school. We then take those “rules” and turn them into positive statements. The end result is a class belief’s statement such as: “We will be kind, respectful, responsible and safe. We will have fun and work hard.” When we have our belief statement, we have students create and sign a belief poster and display it in the classroom. Our class beliefs become the foundation for learning in our classroom.

You can not take for granted that your students know how to line up, when to sharpen a pencil, or even how to be respectful in the hallways. We have created “Back to School Procedures” that we use with our classes the first few weeks of school. We created a simple teacher page that guides you through the procedure. There also is a poster that you can print in color, laminate and use year after year. We have included all of our  11 procedures into a super bundle that you can find here.

It is extremely important to make every student feel a part of the class and to feel accepted. We purposely do a lot of fun activities at the beginning of the year to have students get up out of their seats and talk with other classmates. When students get to know each other, they realize that they have much more in common than what they thought. This helps to build strong relationships that will last the entire school year. Below is a picture of our classroom bingo game that has the students getting out of their seats and meeting others in the class in order to get a bingo. You can access it by clicking here.

One of the biggest challenges we tackle each school year is getting to know our students. Starting the first week of school we do many activities that allow us to learn more about the class. For example, we often have the students fill out a student interest survey that you can download here for FREE here. It helps you to better understand your students and connect with them.

We would love to hear from other educators about what you feel is necessary to do the first few weeks of school. Please feel free to leave comments on our blog!