Back To School Activities

The first few days of school are special. You’re meeting strangers who are going to quickly become some of the most important people in your life. Students from many years ago still tell me that they remember what I was wearing or what joke I told on the first day of school. Make your first impression a good one.

One activity that I enjoy doing is the “What Matters To Me?” activity. It ties science nicely into to getting to know the students. I give each student a clip art picture of a flask and ask them to fill it in with what matters to them. Sometimes I ask them leading questions – what are your favorite things about school, what do you hope this school year is like – and other times I just leave it blank and have students decide for themselves what it should be about.

Since it’s the first assignment of the year, students often go all out – they cut pictures out of magazines and decorate their flasks with their favorite football team colors. We hang them around the room and leave them up for most of the year to admire. You can download your own copy of “What Matters to Me” on my TpT store.

Every year, I try to do at least a few of these Getting to Know you activities. Kids love “minute to win it” activities and I mix it up – some whole class activities and some team activities. At the end of the year, my students always comment on how much fun their first days of school were because of these minute to win it games. 

Another activity I enjoy is the #20YearsFromNow. In this activity, I give students two frames to draw pictures of themselves in. One picture is themselves today, and they label the picture with hashtags that describe themselves. The second picture is 20 years in the future and they label that picture with hashtags to describe what they hope/want their futures to be like.

This is a fun way to get to know who they are and who they want to be. You can download your own copy of #20YearsFromNow at my TpT store.

 

What are your Back-To-School activities?