My first year, I ran a beautiful first week.
We did a name game, a bingo icebreaker, an All About Me page with a self portrait, and a team-building challenge with spaghetti and marshmallows. Everybody laughed. Nobody cried. I went home on Friday feeling like a natural.
Then in late September I was trying to plan a reading unit and realized I could not have told you which of my students actually liked to read.
I had spent five days making them comfortable, which mattered, and I had collected almost nothing I could use. The All About Me pages went up on a bulletin board in August and came down in October without my ever reading them properly.
That was the mistake. I had treated the first week as a mood to set rather than information to gather.
Here is the rule I use now. Every first week activity has to leave me knowing one specific thing about a child that I can still use in October. If it does not, it is a game, and one game is plenty.
These five activities all pass that test, and between them they take about twenty minutes a day. Here is what each one is for, and what you do with what it gives you.
1. Start With What They Did over Summer
Day one, before any rules or routines, ask them to write about the summer. Not a paragraph with a topic sentence. Just what happened.
I use a suitcase template, because a shape makes a blank page much less frightening on a day when everything is unfamiliar, and because it fills a bulletin board later.
This works as the opener for three reasons. It needs no prior knowledge of anything you have taught. Every child has an answer. And it hands you your first writing sample of the year, on day one, before you have taught a single lesson.
What to do with it. Read them that night with a pen, and mark three things: who writes in sentences, who writes one word and stops, and who tells you something personal. That is your first read on writing stamina and your first read on who trusts you, and you have it before the first Monday is over.
2. Make the Icebreaker Collect Data
Some icebreakers produce noise and nothing else. A Find Someone Who grid produces noise AND a record, because at the end of it every square has a name in it.
Kids move around the room finding a different classmate for each box: someone who has a pet, someone who traveled this summer, someone who read a book. They write the name in the square. It takes fifteen minutes and it sounds like a party.
What to do with it. Collect them. The grid tells you who moved confidently and who stayed at the edges, which is the single most useful social observation you will make all week. It also tells you which children nobody approached, and that is information you want in week one rather than in week nine.
If you want more variations on the format, Teaching Made Practical has eight get-to-know-you ideas that need no printing at all, and Thrifty in Third Grade has a good set aimed squarely at third through fifth.
3. Ask Them Directly, in Writing
This is the one most of us skip, and it is the one that pays for the other four.
Give every child a page and ask them plainly. Favorite book. Favorite subject. What they love about school. What they do after school. One goal for the year. One thing they want you to know.
Children will tell you almost anything in the first week, before they have decided what kind of student they are going to be in your room. The McREL Institute's piece on interest inventories makes the case better than I can, and it is worth ten minutes before you write your own questions.
What to do with it. This is the whole game, and it deserved its own post, so I wrote one: what to ask students in the first week, and what to do with their answers.
4. Let Them Describe Themselves
There is a difference between a child telling you their favorite color and a child telling you what kind of person they think they are. The second one is worth asking for directly.
Give them a page of character words, creative, brave, helpful, thoughtful, determined, curious, and ask them to color or circle every word that describes them. Then ask them to pick three and explain each one with an example.
The explaining is the part that matters. Any child will circle helpful. The child who writes I am helpful because I walk my neighbor's dog when she is at work has just told you something real about their life.
What to do with it. Keep them. When you need to write a report comment in November, or say something true to a parent at conferences, or talk a child through a hard moment in February, you have their own words about who they are. Quoting a child to themselves is one of the most powerful things a teacher can do.
5. Use It in October, Not Just August
Everything above is wasted if it goes on a bulletin board and stays there.
So on Friday of the first week, do one unglamorous thing. Put all of it in one folder per child, or one binder with a divider per child, and put that folder somewhere you will actually open it. Mine lived next to my plan book, not in a cupboard.
Then use it on purpose:
- When you choose a read-aloud, check what they said they liked
- When a word problem needs a name and a topic, use a real child and a real interest. It costs nothing and they notice every time
- When you write the first report comments, open the character page first
- When a child is struggling in February, reread what they wrote in August. It is often the fastest route back to them
This is not a soft extra. In John Hattie's synthesis of more than 800 meta-analyses, teacher and student relationships carry an effect size of about 0.72, which puts them well above the average influence on achievement. The first week is where that relationship gets its raw material.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much of the first week should be activities like this? About twenty minutes a day, alongside your routines and procedures. The procedures still need the bulk of the time in week one. These five fit in the gaps.
What if my class already knows each other? Then skip the name game and keep all five of these, because none of them is about learning names. A class that has been together since kindergarten still has not told YOU any of this.
What do I do with the child who writes nothing? Note it and do not push it on day one. A blank page in the first week is information too. Ask them the same questions out loud in week two, one at a time, while everyone else is working.
One More Thing Worth Saying
The first week has a reputation as the throwaway week, the one you fill until the real teaching starts. Spend it collecting information about each student. The rest of the year is easier when you do.
If You Would Rather Not Build It From Scratch
Everything above works with lined paper and a list of questions. If you would rather have the pages already made, these are the three I use.
The First Day and First Week of School Activities pack is all five of the above in one place: the suitcase summer writing, the Find Someone Who icebreaker, All About Me organizers, the Words Are Powerful character page, a partner interview, a classroom scavenger hunt, and the student interest inventory. It runs from second through fifth grade, which is why it survives a grade-level move.
The Find Someone Who bingo is part two on its own, if the icebreaker is the piece you want and you already have the rest. It is the one my students asked to do again in January.
The Student Interest Survey pack goes deeper on part three, with separate editable inventories for reading, math and writing rather than one general page. If you only take one thing from this post, take the idea of asking subject by subject.
Keep Going
The meet the teacher letter that does the talking for you, for the night before all this starts.
Student-centered seating layouts, for the room they walk into on day one.
