Engaging Lessons to Make the First Week of School a Success

What makes the perfect first week of school?

We’re pretty sure you could ask 1,000 different teachers this question and get 1,000 different answers. But we’re also pretty sure a few things would pop up more than once: getting to know your students, setting clear expectations, and reviewing the basics.

It may be tempting to spend the first week of school engaged in icebreakers and getting-to-know-you activities; after all, everyone’s easing back into the school year (yourself included) and connecting with students is essential to successful classroom management.

But if you’re someone who believes the first week of school also sets a foundation for the rest of the year, you might be concerned that a week spent outside your subject area focus doesn’t send the right message about what your class is all about. The expectations you set (unintentionally or not) are going to have lasting consequences in the weeks and months to come, so you want your students to get some idea of what you and your classroom are all about (especially when that all-too-short “honeymoon period” ends).

For us, the first week of school was all about setting students up to be successful. Sure, we made time to get to know students, but our priority was introducing them to the skills and routines they’d see regularly as a part of our classes. We wanted our students to experience success with those skills and routines as early as possible, giving them confidence that our classroom is a place where they would be expected to work hard but also a place where that hard work would pay off.

And, of course, if we could accomplish this while still having a bit of fun? All the better.

So whether you’re struggling to figure out what your perfect first week of school looks like, in need of a few fresh ideas, or eager for another way to procrastinate getting started on this year’s lesson plans, we’ve got suggestions for you.

The First Day of School

The first day of school deserves its own careful thought and planning: it’s your chance to make a first impression, and it has its own important tasks to get out of the way. After a simple icebreaker that very often helped us complete our required roll call, we’d get course paperwork out of the way with a scavenger hunt activity (much better than wearing our voices out talking for every minute of the first day).

The scavenger hunt was a great way to make sure our students got the essential information we needed them to know while still keeping them engaged. Even better, we had the opportunity to walk around and chat with students while they worked, getting to know a little more about them in a casual way.

Making the Most of the First Week of School

Introduction to Classroom Routines

We love a good routine, and one of our biggest routines was the use of bellringers to start each class period. While students traditionally had a menu of bellringers they could work through at their own pace over the course of a week—Typing Club lessons, Quill grammar, vocabulary Kahoots, and a First Chapter Friday Nearpod—we often used the first week of school to introduce each activity one at a time: Typing Club on Tuesday, Quill on Wednesday . . . you get the idea.

This worked well for a few reasons. First of all, it gave us the time to ensure students got correctly signed in to the apps and websites we used. Typing Club and Quill both required students to create an account; we required students to sign into Kahoot a specific way; some students hadn’t used Nearpod before. These tedious “signing in” tasks can linger for weeks. With concentrated time to take care of them, we had far fewer students still unable to log in (or find the website or remember their password) than we usually would.

By introducing each activity one day at a time, we also got to explain our purpose and how we expected each activity to be completed without students going into information overload. Students could try each activity immediately after hearing about it, and we had more time than usual to help them get started.

Students tended to experience success on these weekly assignments right away, and when they didn’t, we got to intervene early, before it did too much damage to their grades.

All About Me Activity

While we’re not huge on icebreakers, we do think it’s important to take time to learn something about our students. It shows them we care about them, it helps us more quickly match names to faces, and, when designed carefully, it gives us insight into each particular student.

We tried to make our assignment a combination of silly, personal things and more academic things. In addition to asking students for a photo and their preferred name, we asked them to identify a goal for the school year, tell us something we should know about them, and choose three adjectives to describe themselves. We asked them what they do when they feel happy and stressed and then to tell us something they couldn’t live without and something they could easily give up. Finally, we asked them to tell us on a scale of 1–10 how excited they were about the upcoming school year.

The assignment was simple and straightforward, the prompts were vague enough to let students decide how much information they wanted to share while still giving us helpful insights, and students had the opportunity to privately communicate anything they wanted us to know. We also tried to write a quick comment on each one so students would know we did, in fact, read it.

Introduction to Course Expectations and Assignments

In our AP class, where we didn’t do daily bellringers, we still used that first week to introduce our students to expectations for their regular assignments.

As technology improved and plagiarism became an increasing problem, we started devoting a class period to a discussion of academic honesty. We introduced two common assignments—Guided Reading Questions and our End-of-Novel Flip Book—as well as the rubrics we would use throughout the year to score those assignments.

We also spent time reviewing how to correctly punctuate, cite, and integrate quotations. This is something we spent a lot of time on with our AP (and honors) students. Evidence is a core part of success in English, and teaching students to handle quotations appropriately is a relatively small skill that makes a noticeable impact on their writing.

We also introduced our AP students to the concept of interpretation: making a claim about a text’s meaning and supporting it with evidence from the text itself. This is an important part of what we do in most English classes but definitely in AP Literature, and we loved using Norman Rockwell paintings to introduce the skill. The visual “texts” felt accessible to students, and we had lively discussions that we could refer back to as we moved into more complicated written texts.

Engaging Introduction to Our First Unit

By the end of the first week of school, we were ready to introduce our first unit, but we always wanted to do it in an engaging, high-interest way. We spent much of the first week focused on expectations and routines, so we wanted to keep motivation and engagement high, showing students that our class wasn’t going to be entirely a drag.

For many years, we started our sophomore students with a mini-unit on plot. We started by reviewing the basic plot diagram with Pixar shorts before adding an episode of Modern Family. The episode we selected was told out of sequence, so it provided students with the opportunity to make a plot diagram for a slightly longer and slightly more challenging text and allowed us to introduce other plot-related terms like foreshadowing, suspense, flashback, and en media res.

We eventually transitioned to a different unit and used the end of the first week of school to review theme using Pixar shorts. We went over six guidelines for writing theme students, had students practice identifying appropriate theme statements based on those guidelines, and, finally, assigned them to practice writing their own theme statements. It was a successful unit and a fun close to the first week of school that set up students for success in the unit in the weeks to come as we introduced the 5C paragraph and they practiced using the writing template for a paragraph about the theme of The LEGO Batman Movie.

While some of the small details changed over the years, our first week of school always kept setting up students for success as its focus. We introduced our expectations, reviewed important concepts, and did it all in a way that allowed students to experience success in their first week back. And while it probably wasn’t all fun, we did try to end on a high note!

What are your plans for the first week of school? We’d love to hear about them at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. Interested in hearing us chat more about the first week of school? We talk about a lot of these things and share a few additional tips for success on our podcast.

And if you’re dreading going back this year, struggling to make plans, or just excited by what you’ve seen here, we’ve got a Back to School bundle just for you. It includes a daily agenda template, a “This or That?” icebreaker, a syllabus template (with scavenger hunt), our All About Me activity, and our Pixar theme activity. Pair the bundle with our blog explaining our bellringers, and your first week is done—giving you one more day to enjoy your summer!