First Week of School Activities to Make Students Feel Welcome

Setting the tone for the year is important and the first week of school is the perfect time to do that! Make your students feel welcome in their new environment and establish a foundation of trust by doing community building activities during the first week of school!

On the first day of school, we do a lot of things! One thing that I never forget to do is the All Are Welcome activity. After reading the book by Alexandra Penfold, my students write their name on a banner, I take their picture, and we display the photo banners in the classroom.

Seeing their photo in the classroom helps to instill a sense of ownership over their new space. When students feel valued, they will treat others with respect. We also talk about how we can make one another feel welcome in our new environment and they write about that as well.

This simple but sweet activity will help your students feel comfortable in their new space during the first week of school! Want this activity to do with your class? Grab it below!

Celebrating names is something that is so great to do during the first week of school, even with older kids! The name activities pictured above may be a little too young for 3rd-5th grades, but you should absolutely do some kind of name activity with your students! I share lots of ideas in this blog post.

Doing a name activity during the first week of school helps students learn each others’ names and makes any new students feel more comfortable. It also makes students feel important and see the value in their own name!

One activity that sets the tone for the year is a word of the year activity. We read the book “The Word Collector” by Peter H. Reynolds and my students choose a word that they hope will describe their year. Doing this during the first week of school will encourage students to strive for success in your classroom!

After reading the book and discussing the power of the words we choose to use, students can pick a word that they hope will describe their school year and write about why they chose that word! This is also a great way to introduce goal setting. Discuss with your class the words they chose and what they can do to try and make their word choice a reality!

Looking for other ways to build your classroom community during the first week of school or later in back to school season? Check out this blog post!

Happy back to school season!