My Plans For My First Week Of School

After years of teaching, I have settled into a routine for the first week of school that accomplishes my goals of getting to know students and beginning to build a reading community. It is a first week that is low prep and low stress so that I can enjoy meeting my new learners.

Like any good first week plan, it is flexible, and while everything we do is meaningful, it is also easily adjusted. Activities can be shortened, moved around, or continued another day. I may not be back in my teaching rhythm that first week of school so the pacing of my class periods may not be 100% on point yet.

Read on for my day by day plans plus links to any resources I use.

Day 1 

I aim for the first day of school to be as no prep and no stress as possible. The schedule on the first day at my school can vary depending on whether the middle school grades keep their homeroom for the day  or just have an extended homeroom. Either way I end up not seeing all of my classes or not seeing them for the same amount of time. Because of this, I developed a set of nine activities that allow me to get to know my students, but require very few materials. If we get to them all, awesome, but there’s nothing lost if we don’t.

You can read about it in this blog post, which includes the Google Slides presentation with direction for all nine activities.

Day 2

I consider our second day back to school to be my first real classes with students, and that first class is all about books. Our first activity is a genre circles activity, which reviews the 10 different genres in my classroom library and allows students (and me) to see who else enjoys reading the same genres they do. Then students begin completing a reader’s survey to help me get to know them as readers while I set up for a book dating activity.

At each of the genre circles, which were already spread around the room, I pull books from the corresponding section of my classroom library for students to preview. For genres that were more popular, I know to pull more books. The genre circles activity also lets me know if areas of my classroom library might need more books based on the current group of students’ interests.

During the book dating activity, I have 4-6 tables around the room (or groups of students desked pushed together to form tables) and 2-3 genres at each table. Students begin where they are seated and preview books from the genres at their table. As students preview the books, they record some basic information about the book, including whether or not they’d be interested in reading it. After a few minutes, students move to a new table to preview books from other genres. After one or two more rounds where students have to move, I may let them return to tables with genres they’d like to spend more time looking at. To wrap up the book dating, I ask students to circle the book they are most interested in reading. I set that book aside with their reader’s survey tucked inside to examine with the student on day 3 or 4.

On day two I also distribute a family survey for students to take home to their parents or guardians and we fill out an application for a public library card. I like to do that as early as possible in the year so that students have audiobooks and ebooks as an option during our independent reading time throughout the year.

Read more about genre circles and book dating in this blog post. Find all of the resources for genre circles, book dating, and a reader’s survey here and my family (and student) surveys here.

Day 3 & 4

After spending our first day getting to know students and our second day introducing students to books, day three and four continue my goals of building relationships with students and building a reading community in my classroom. 

Over these next two days, students work through a series of station activities that include:

1. Making bookmarks. Students can start from scratch or choose from a variety of designs to color. Students put their names on these and I laminate them so that students can use them all year long. Besides helping them keep their place in their book, these bookmarks also help identify whose book it is if it gets left behind in my class or others.
2. Writing a letter to me. I write a letter to my students each year for them to read as a way to learn more about me, but also to serve as a model for their letters. Students tell me about their likes and dislikes, describe how they learn best, and share anything thing else they feel is important for me to know about them.
3. Hunting through the syllabus. Students work in groups to complete a scavenger hunt of questions that help them pull out all of the things the need to know about our from my syllabus including my classroom expectations, the books we’ll be reading, and what to expect with homework.
4. Asking their classmates questions with a “quiz.” Students again work in groups to answer questions like “how many pets do you have and what kinds?” or “who has the longest commute to school?” These are things they may not already know about each other (most students have been attending the same school since kindergarten) and I can read through these quizzes later to help me learn more about students. This classmate quiz and the syllabus scavenger hunt also allow me to see how students work together in groups (who participates, who doesn’t, who takes a lead, who gets off task).
5. Setting up their ELA notebook. Students glue a few inserts of information into their notebook that we will reference all year. They also dedicate one page for creating a to be read (TBR) list that they will add to throughout the year, and glue in a bookshelf graphic that they’ll use to track the books they read throughout the year.
6. Finding their first independent reading book. At this station, students meet with me in our classroom library to take a look at the book they were most interested in at the end of day two’s book dating. Some students may stick with that title and I help them start build their TBR with additional suggestions. Other students may want to browse more and look for another book.

If time allows on day three and/or four, we may also begin our first writing piece of the year. More on that below. 

Read more about my first days stations in this blog post and in this one. Find all of the resources I use during stations here.

Day 5

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes my pacing is a little off and students may need time to finish up tasks for days two, three or four. I also collect students’ family surveys and library card applications, helping students fill in anything they were unsure about.

While students are wrapping up any unfinished business, I move from table to table showing students how to use BookSource, the free platform I use to manage our classroom library. Once at least one student has successfully checked out their independent reading book, I move on to the next table, allowing that student to be the “expert” and help others.

Students also have an opportunity to continue building their TBR lists with a book tasting and a book scavenger hunt. For the book tasting, I put together themed bins like books set at school, my summer reads, and firsts in series. The bins are located at the small group table in my classroom for students to browse. The book scavenger hunt will take students to the shelves of our classroom library looking for things like a book published in the past 1-2 years or an author whose name starts with the same letter as theirs. This gets books in students’ hands that they might not normally gravitate toward.

If we haven’t already started our first writing piece of the year on day three or four, by day five we are definitely ready. We read “Where I’m From,” a poem by George Ella Lyons. I use this poem as a way to review grammar basics (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and sensory details (otherwise known as imagery), which we’ll work to add to our writing all year long.

After looking at or listening to a few imitations, we begin brainstorming for our own. Students complete a brainstorming organizer with categories for their ideas, which they then pick and choose from to plug into a fill-in-the-blank template. We’ll continue working on this writing piece during the second week of school.

As a final activity on that last day of the first week of school, I held a circle (based on restorative practice’s proactive circles) to discuss classroom expectations and what learning should look and sound like during whole class instruction, small group work, independent work, independent reading, and work on devices.

Read more about my first writing assignment of the year in this blog post, which includes the Google Drive folder with all of the resources for the assignment. Find all of the resources for book tastings and book scavenger hunts here.

By the end of that first week, students should feel comfortable in our classroom and have the beginnings of a connection with me as their teacher. Students all have a book for independent reading, which we officially kick off in week two, a TBR list for when then finish that first book, and an understanding of how our classroom library works and where to find things. By the end of that first week, I have the foundations of relationships with my students, I have begun to learn about them as readers and writers, and I have a sense of the supports students will need from the whole class level down to individual students. All of this allows us to comfortably begin academic instruction in the second week of school.