Not Another Syllabus! First Day of Class Activities to Engage Students

We’ve never really loved the first day of school.

In theory, it sounds great. First day of class activities are relatively easy and (sometimes) fun, you’re (theoretically) rested from the summer, you’re meeting your new students, and all the anticipation of a fresh start is in the air.

But in reality? It’s awkward. And boring.

You’re meeting 200 new people. Those 200 people aren’t really interested in talking to you yet, so you feel like you’re putting on an energetic performance that’s falling horribly flat (but still makes you feel EXHAUSTED at the end of the day). 

Your first day of class activities are unavoidably painful: your primary activity is going over the same syllabus you’ve gone over dozens of times before. You strive to be an engaging teacher, and yet there is only so far you can go to jazz up a syllabus, so there’s the added cringe factor of delivering a presentation that you know is boring. 

And if, like us, you’re not really an icebreaker person, you have to force reluctant teenagers to participate in an activity that you yourself don’t really like (and probably complained about during professional development a few days prior). 

And through it all, you’ve got teenage eyes evaluating you, the brains behind them making decisions and judgments about you that will have ramifications for the next ten months. (No pressure!)

It’s no better from the students’ perspective. Students in most high schools rotate through 6–8 classes at a time, and first day of class activities are pretty much identical in all subjects. Just like you, your students are doing 6–8 icebreakers and reviewing 6–8 nearly identical syllabuses.

So, why do it? you might be thinking. You’re the teacher. Skip it. Do something different. Why do the same thing 14 years in a row when you know it’s not working?

There are many teachers who do buck tradition (and probably have a more enjoyable first day of school). But we believe the traditional first day of class activities are, in fact, worth doing on the first day, so we’ve found ways to make them at least a little bit more tolerable, and, as always, we’re eager to share the wealth.

Why Traditional First Day of Class Activities Are Important

They’re expected.

This is probably one of the few times we would actually use this as a reason to do something, but pretty much everyone is expecting you to spend time getting to know your students and reviewing classroom rules: administrators, parents, and students.

This is information you need to communicate to your students, and students aren’t expecting much else from you on the first day. It’s unlikely anyone’s going to be horrified that this is how you spent your first day of school or assume that every day in your class will be like this.

The first day of school is the best time to do it.

If you’re going to have to do these traditional first day of class activities eventually, you might as well get them out of the way on the first day of school. 

We mentioned above that your students aren’t expecting much else from you on the first day, so why not capitalize on that and get it over with? They’re just as nervous and reluctant to come back from summer break as you were: many of them need an easy first day to adjust to school-year routines, catch up with their friends, and gear up for another year. Most students aren’t ready to dive into learning, serious or otherwise, on Day 1.

There’s also bound to be a little bit of chaos the first day (really, the first week) of school, and by starting with icebreakers and expectations, you’re allowing space for the inevitable transfers and schedule changes in a way that won’t require students to make up work or catch up on important lessons.

And as much as we dread the syllabus review, we’d rather get it out of the way and then dive into the good stuff than have to take a pause from our introductory unit later. (Which we’ve had to do after a print shop debacle, and it is NOT fun.)

You do need to connect to your students.

It’s no secret that one of the biggest keys to effective classroom management is building a positive relationship with students.

We do need to communicate to our students that we care about them as individuals, and making an effort to get to know them and to more quickly match names and faces are respectful moves that will make our lives easier in the weeks to come.

Even though we sometimes forget, teenagers are people, too, which means they’re subject to the same nerves and discomfort we are when meeting new people and coming into a new environment. We want to communicate from the very beginning that our classroom is a place where they are wanted and safe.

Setting expectations from Day 1 makes a difference.

Another key to classroom management is setting clear expectations, especially before problems arise. When we take the time to ensure that we and our students are on the same page about expected behaviors and procedures in our classroom, we can stop some problems before they begin. And if problems do arise, we’ve provided fair warning of what the consequences will be in our classroom. (See the aforementioned print shop debacle and know that this was another of the results.)

Traditional first day of class activities can be a way to introduce yourself to your students.

Like we said above, we’re not icebreaker people. We love to talk to our students and get to know them, but we’d rather do it through organic conversation, not awkward games.

We’re also big on routine, habit, and organization. It’s who we are as people, and it’s how we run our classrooms. 

We had coworkers who were great at creating engaging first day of school, or even first week of school, activities, and this also represented their personality and teaching style. If you’re a teacher who always has students up and moving or working in groups, and you shudder at the thought of being called a “traditional” teacher, then you should do something different on the first day of school: your students will know what you’re about from the very beginning.

And in the same way, it’s okay for us quieter, more traditional types to show our students what we’re about from the very beginning, too. Our classrooms aren’t going to be full of in-seat to out-of-seat or hands-on learning. We’re going to set up routines and follow them throughout the year, and when we start with the expected activities, we give our students a clue about what they can expect from us.

But the way in which we carry out those traditional first day of class activities can also tell them something about us. When we try to make our syllabus review more interactive or take the time to design an infographic syllabus, we’re communicating to students that even if we are creatures who thrive in routine and appreciate the predictability of habit, we also take our work seriously and do our best to make assignments for them that are productive, thoughtful, and engaging.

Three First Day of Class Activities We’ve Found Effective

(Melting) Icebreakers

We like to ask our students some kind of “getting to know you” question on the first day of school. We don’t love the big, crazy games, and we know some of our students don’t either, so we prefer to keep it simple.

For many years, Steph asked her students to share a highlight from their summer, but in later years, she steered away from that question, recognizing that some students don’t want to share anything that personal and some students may have had a terrible summer that they don’t want to talk about.

Instead, we gravitated toward asking “would you rather” questions while taking attendance. These silly questions still helped us start to connect names to faces and created an opportunity for students to elaborate and share about themselves if they wanted to without requiring students to share something overly personal.

These are our “Would You Rather” questions from one year:

We did another set during attendance on the second day of school:

Syllabus Scavenger Hunt

Most of us are expected to have a syllabus (and to go over it on the first day), and we think there are a few basics every good syllabus should include. But one year, we decided we just.could.not. spend another first day of school talking for the entire day. 

So we created a syllabus scavenger hunt. We distributed any course paperwork we needed our students to have, and then we distributed a scavenger hunt activity with questions about the most important details from the syllabus and other paperwork we wanted to be sure students knew.

Then, we set students loose, and as they worked on the assignment, we had the opportunity to wander around and chat with students in the more organic way we prefer.

Sometimes, we had students work independently and gave extra credit participation points to the first few students to finish; other years, we allowed students to work together and gave everyone participation points for completing the assignment.

Either way, it was a far more pleasant first day for us and for our students, and they still got the key information we needed them to know.

If you use an LMS like Canva or Google Classroom, this can also be a great way to have students explore your set-up. In addition to posting any key classroom documents, you can ask questions about parts of the website so students have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with it in a low-pressure situation.

Extra Credit Literary Terms Quiz

When we started doing the syllabus scavenger hunt, it usually took up most of the class period once we were done with our “getting to know you” questions. But for many years, we gave our students an extra credit literary terms quiz to fill up the awkward 10–15 minutes that usually remained after we’d finished icebreakers and the syllabus review.

It allowed us to get a sense of what our students knew (in a low-stakes way), and we wrote the questions about what we had done that summer, using it as a chance to introduce ourselves to our students. While, perhaps, not the most fun first day of class activity, we found it a nice break from talking, and our students didn’t mind starting the year with some extra credit.

If you, too, are tired of talking for the entire first day of school and eager for something to mix it up, we hope these suggestions make for a more engaging day for you and your students. And even more importantly, if you project more zen-coffehouse-vibes than this-is-a-place-to-have-fun, we hope we’ve given you some validation that it’s okay to stick to traditional first day of class activities, even if they’ll never be your favorite days of the year.

If you’re looking for a ready-to-go, done-for-you first week of school, consider purchasing our Back to School bundle, which includes not only the minimal-themed infographic syllabus activity, but a Google Slides daily agenda template, an All About Me activity, our bestselling Pixar shorts lesson to introduce theme, and, as a bonus, a “This or That” icebreaker you can use to get to know your students.