Easy Activities for the First Week of School

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Yay, first week of school activities are amazing for classroom community building! Are you feeling panicked or excited?! Either way I have some quick no prep activity ideas for you to do with your students.

kids first week of school activities

Back to School Team Building Ideas

To begin with, whether you do morning meeting in your classroom or not, the first week of school is a great time to integrate activities to help your students learn about each other. Some may know each other from other years, but they are all looking to make a connection.

In this blog post, I share my favorite back to school morning meeting activities. You can use them any time of the day, and they are quick 5 minute activities with no prep needed. Go check them out!

Also, don’t forget that when you are doing these games to help students build relationships, you also need to be sharing about yourself, too! Your class wants to know about you and learn about this new person who will be teaching them for the next many months.

First Week of School Get To Know You Reading Idea

This reading lesson idea is REALLY easy.

Pick a book that tells something about yourself. Anything!

If you’re like me and like pickles, you might want to use my book Pickle Things. It is a silly book about all things pickles! I use this as a 5-10 minute read aloud as I share with my students that I have a habit of eating a pickle every day.

This achieves a few early goals with setting the tone for your literacy lessons:

  • makes reading together fun
  • shows that we can see ourselves in the books we will read together
  • allows for easy discussion starters to respond to the text

First Week of School Writing Activity

To start the year off, I always love to do a free write.

If it sounds too simple, let me tell you why.

Your students should just write or draw about anything they want to share.

This gives them the opportunity to put things in writing they may not be ready to say to you. It will show you their personality and writing style. You can assess students’ writing ability and note things you will need to work on this year.

However, if students need help thinking of an idea to write about, here are some:

  • write about a meal you recently ate
  • write about a car ride you took
  • write about a funny moment
  • write about your neighborhood

I try to be very careful in the first week with the types of questions and prompts that I give students. It is important to not assume that they all went on vacation or all got to do fun things. I make sure to not put the class in a position to be comparing their summers or feeling embarrassed about things they were not able to do.

Back to School Math About Me Craft

Don’t be worried about the word craft for these activities for the first week of school! You can make this beginning of the year math lesson as easy or complicated as you wish.

Your students should decorate a paper or poster with numbers that represent things about them.

For example, their numbers could be:

  • age
  • # of siblings
  • # of turns it takes to get to school
  • # of animals in house
  • # of trees in yard
  • # of address

Any numbers that are important to them or represent something in their lives can be included.

Depending on your students’ abilities, they can show these numbers as:

  • numerals
  • arrays
  • addition statements
  • comparison statements
  • ten frame
  • subtraction statements

This is a wonderful opportunity to let students express their creativity and share some information about themselves.

I hope that you found these activities for the first week of school helpful! Lastly, remember that the most important things to do are to build relationships and establish routines! HAVE FUN!