Parents and students are not the only ones that get anxious about going back to school. Teachers have been carefully planning their first week of school all summer long while families enjoyed their summer vacation. The first day of school is what will set the tone for every student in your class for the rest of the year, and that is a daunting and stressful task. Teachers want to make sure that their students have a joyful and exciting day filled with fun to help them be excited for their class and wanting to come back the next day. Here are some activities that elementary school teachers could consider for the first day of school to help start the year off right.
Math Riddle Morning Work
On the first day of school, it is important to get to know your students, as well as let your students get to know you. If they get a good feel of who you are, they will be more comfortable in your presence. A great activity to immediately start math class would be to do a math riddle for the students morning work. Starting morning work on the first day will help your students know what the routine will be to start class everyday. If students know that they are expected to start something right as they walk through the door, that will help get their attention and to start off class seamlessly. Making this morning work a riddle is a great activity for the first day to help students get to know you, while at the same time, being able to start math on the first day. Your riddle could look something like this:
- Solve the problem to find out Ms. Smith’s favorite pizza topping.
You can change up the question to apply it to yourself
- One side of the sheet will have the math problems such as: 5×5=___
- The other side of the sheet will have the key where the answers will stand for a letter such as: 25= P
- After the students solve all the math problems, they will be able to figure out a fun fact about the teacher!
After the students complete the riddle, they can then turn to everyone at their table and talk about their own favorite pizza toppings to get to know the students around them. Letting students interact on the first day is extremely important to help them feel comfortable in the classroom to ask questions.
Group Work With Math Worksheets
After you have started the class off with a quick morning work activity, it would be important to get students talking, thinking and interacting. If the students start off their first day learning how to interact with each other, they will be able to know how to do it for the following activities for the rest of the year. For the very first activity you do, you can focus on demonstration and modeling how group work should look, without stressing too much about the 4th grade math worksheet, but more so on interacting with each other. With the days of digital work and computers, students have struggled to learn how to interact with each other in person, which is an important skill to make sure they master before moving on to middle school. The math worksheet can just be a tool to help you model this. Some things to make sure you teach your students during this time:
- Demonstrating your ideas, thoughts, questions as an idea and not an absolute
- Explaining your thought process
- Use a compliment sandwich when suggesting corrections to each other
- Use sentence frames such as: “I like your idea about “x” however, I think for “y” we could add “z” to improve your idea even further.”
- Be kind and polite
- Make sure to add value to your group
No matter what you decide to do with your students on the first day of class, your students will be excited to be there, so whatever you do, make sure they know you care about them and are happy to have them in class with you! They will always remember how you made them feel.
