First Week Of School Activities: You Can Even Do These Virtually!

The start of the school year is usually filled with collaborative classroom projects, getting-to-know-you games, opportunities for students and teachers to visit and chat together, and meaningful conversations about classroom community.

Sitting here ten days away from a virtual first day of school, I am continually reflecting on how I can build an authentic and supportive classroom community without being face to face with students. While many of my favorite activities for the first two weeks of school will have to be set aside (painting our book bags, learning group dances, teaching how to turn and talk…), there are some that I am determined to transfer to our virtual platform.

These are some of my favorite ideas for the beginning of the year, and I think they will still work even without being in person with my students.

Welcome Letters

We do these every year, and I think this year these will be even more special. The week before school starts, we send a snail mail letter to each student, with a short message from their teachers. It’s such a great way to generate excitement about the start of school, and to help students feel seen and appreciated by their teachers before school even begins! Here are the cute cards we love to use:

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First Day Of School Picture

In past years, we’ve used this adorable homemade wooden frame with cutout letters to take a picture of each child on the first day of school. Then a few days later, we print out the photo and give it to their families when they come for our Back To School Night. While we won’t be holding a Back To School Night this year, I still want to create an opportunity for students to have their first day of school commemorated with a photograph. I think I am going to transform our photo frame into a print-at-home coloring activity, and then have families upload to Seesaw a photo of their child holding their finished product!

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Class Promise

This is always one of my favorite activities. After reading many picture books and having several conversations about our classroom rules and norms, how to be a good friend, and introducing growth mindset, we write a classroom promise containing the attitudes and behaviors we are going to strive for. Then every child decorates a handprint with their name and we post them around the edge of the classroom promise. The promise hangs in our room the whole year.

Well this activity is just too good to eliminate. We will still be reading those books together, and we will still be having those conversations, so why can’t we still create a classroom promise? I plan to send this home as a project for students to cut out and color in their handprint, and post a picture of it on Seesaw. I’ll take all the pictures and create a virtual class promise that can be shown to students and that will live in our Seesaw Announcements area all year long. I may even print our their handprints and also hang the class promise in my classroom, so they can see how it looks hanging on the wall.

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Garden Of Love Wall

Part of our discussions around classroom community involve creating our “Garden Of Love” wall, which has words for qualities we want to emulate in our classroom, such as “kind”, “perseverant”, “brave”, and “honest”. Each time we read a picture book that exemplifies one of these words, we add it to our wall. By the end of the first two weeks, we have a huge collection of wonderful words.

Throughout the day, we mention when we notice students living these words in the classroom or on the yard, and we invite the students to choose a plastic butterfly that we pin next to the word. Soon, we let students do the noticing and they can “give butterflies” to their friends. A couple times throughout the year, we switch out our board to make it snowflakes in the winter, and flowers in the spring.

This is another activity I couldn’t let go of, so again I am thinking of creating a virtual page to make this happen. This slideshow page will let us still give butterflies to students, so they can see their contribution to the classroom’s “Garden of Love”!

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Reflection Flipbook

It’s so important to give students a space to reflect on new beginnings and to take in their responses. This flipbook project has been a favorite of mine for letting students represent their first week of school impressions and experiences through artwork and words. While I won’t be able to beautifully display these in my classroom, I can still send these home to be completed and display pictures of their work in our virtual Student Work area.

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How do you build community in your classroom?
xoxo
Laura