The first few days back are always tricky because you don’t have the usual timetabled day. It is important to use this time to set up the expectations and procedures that you will be using each day in the class. Getting these right in September will set you up for success for the rest of the year. Of course, you will need to come back to these throughout the year, particularly after breaks like Christmas and Easter but if you get them right in September, the routines should bounce back quick enough after some reminders.

This post will focus on my second day with second class. I have already done a detailed blog post with links and resources for day one which you can find here. Like I said in that blog post, these are activities that I have used before, that I feel work for me for what I want to teach over the first couple of days, they won’t be to everyone’s taste or work for all classes. You are the best person to decide what you can take from this and what will and won’t work in your own class, trust your own judgement.

8.50 Task Boxes & New Attention Getter

My mornings all begin the same way. When the students come in there will be a task drawer on their table. Each of the groups will have a different task drawer to what they had on the first day. These task drawers will rotate each day until each group has had a turn and then the next four task drawers will be rotated. Like the first day, on the second day students will be using Lego, Magnetic Tiles, Gears & Construction Straws. I will give the students 25 minutes to play and settle in on day two. There will be a timer set and when it comes to the last 5 minutes, I will instruct the children to start tidying up, like we did the day before.

During the children’s play, I will teach them another Attention Getter that I will be using in the classroom this year. This one is a good one to use if you want to save your voice in the classroom. I will teach the students that when they see me tapping my head, they must stop what they are doing and copy my actions without making a sound. I begin always by tapping my head, when I see I have most students attention I begin changing my actions, tapping my shoulders, nose, mouth and eventually I cross my arms when I have everyone’s full attention. It works because it just takes one student to notice what you are doing and gradually as more students start to copy you, the whole class begins to notice and copy too without you having to say a word. During their play time I will practice this a few times with the class, rewarding students who respond quickly with Class Dojo points.

9.15 Affirmation Cards

When the students have tidied up, I will introduce them to our class affirmation cards. I have an entire blog post on how I use these and what the benefits are for using affirmation cards with children here. I will talk to the students about the importance of positive self-talk and what using affirmations can do for us and when we can use them. I will use the random picker on Class Dojo to pick a student to come up and pick a card out of the deck of 52 cards. The student will read out the affirmation to the rest of the class and we will repeat it a couple of times together. I have a space on my whiteboard where I will put the day’s affirmation on it and we will refer back to it throughout the day.

9.20 Review of Class Rules, Expectations & Procedures Kahoot

A lot of what we did the day previous will be repeated in the second day. Reinforcement and repetition is so important over the first few days, especially with younger classes, to ensure they are actually acquiring the information. We will go back over our anchor charts from the day before about what makes a good student, teacher and classmate, what our class rules are and a review of certain procedures we have learned from the day before such as lining up in class, on yard, how to walk in the corridors, going to the toilet, tidying up and so on. When we have reviewed the information, we will have a Kahoot quiz. Each of the students will work in pairs on the quiz using chromebooks. Kahoot is a fantastic assessment tool and the students from 1st right up to 6th absolutely love it! But with this also comes certain expectations to be taught such as volume levels and so on. We will talk about all this prior to starting the quiz.

I will only make up the quiz after the first day in school. This is because I want it to center around our discussion on the first day and the rules that we came up with as a class together. The quiz will be personal to the students sitting in front of me. I will also include pictures of the school and staff included in the quiz to help students get to know their new school.

There are so many amazing quizzes already on Kahoot to suit so many different subjects so it doesn’t always have to mean making your own quiz. It is a great tool for Irish assessment also, I personally have used lots of the themed quizzes during my Irish lessons.

10.00 Read Aloud & Volcano Activity

Next we will be reading My Mouth is a Volcano by Julia Cook. This book is about a child who can’t help but interrupt everyone around him. He struggles to keep his thoughts to himself until it is his time to speak. He refers to his mouth as a volcano and when his volcano erupts, his thoughts just come spewing out of his mouth. I love this book because the repetition in it gets the students involved, by the middle of the book they are almost saying the words along with you. When the boy in the book is finally interrupted by others, he begins to learn a lesson and realises quickly how frustrating it is when others interrupt you. He learns a method of being able to stop his volcano from erupting.

After reading My Mouth is a Volcano, we will make a chart about the different times when it is okay to interrupt, like when someone is hurt or feels sick (there are lots of examples of these on Pinterest), and the different ways that we can let the teacher know that we need something, like making a T sign to show we want to go to the toilet without having to interrupt a lesson.

I will then teach the children a new breathing technique, while also going over our roller coaster breathing from the day before. On this day we will be learning box breathing. I will explain that breathing techniques can help us when we feel like interrupting others too, sometimes taking a few deep breaths, like Louis does in the book can prevent us from letting all of our thoughts out. Breathing techniques are something I use everyday in the class before and during lessons.

Finally we will do an activity worksheet, all about controlling our own volcanoes and how we can stop ourselves from erupting and how we can let others know that we want to speak.

11.10 1, 2 & 3 Star Class Family Wordsearch

Like the 1, 2 & 3 star colouring the day before, I will also show the children a 1, 2, & 3 star word search. I will give the children 3 examples on the whiteboard, one will have a pencil just doing a line through words on the wordsearch and no ticking them off at the bottom, not all the words found, the next will have a circle around the words in pencil, and the final one will have each of the words circled and coloured in with different colours, words ticked off at the bottom as they were found and all words found. The idea of this is to teach the children how to take care in their work and begin to take pride in how they present it. Again we will have a discussion about which wordsearch deserves 1, 2 and 3 stars and why. The students will then get their own wordsearch with all of their names and staff names that they must find. I will let them work in pairs to do this.

11.40 Cassie Stephens All About Me Paper Sculptures

After finishing our wordsearches, we will begin some getting to know me art. I love this lesson from Cassie Stephens. I won’t go into much detail as Cassie has a blog, videos and templates all about it here which is detailed way better than I could ever explain it. For me this will reinforce for the students what we learned the day previous about using a glue stick. I love how these sculptures turn out as they all end up looking completely different but yet students can see that there are so many similarities between them in the class. This art activity will be done over 2 days. There are two templates on Cassie’s website that can be used for this so we will use the first of these which is pictured above on this day.

1.10 Gaeilge Days of the Week

After yard and lunch we will do a small Gaeilge lesson revising what we did yesterday about the days of the week. I will go over the vocabulary, practice the song and then play a game of cluiche Kim with the days of the week posters on the whiteboard. For anyone who doesn’t know, Cluiche Kim is simply putting up pictures on the board of the vocabulary, in this case the days of the week, students close their eyes and teacher removes a picture, they have to guess what was removed and the game repeats. I will then give the students a worksheet where they will be cutting out the days of the week and sticking them into their copies in the correct order. This will allow me to teach them about the procedures around using scissors, how to hold them, moving around the classroom with them and what to do with their scraps of paper. I saw a great idea that I will be using this year where the teacher uses a whiteboard marker to draw a circle on each students table, the students then put the scraps of paper in the circle and when it comes time to tidy up, one student can go around with the paper bin and slide these into the bin. It avoids paper ending up everywhere and the important information being lost in scraps of paper.

1.40 Golden Time

Our last 45 minutes of the day will be free play time. I have explained Golden Time in detail in my previous post so I won’t repeat myself here. The students will get to use any of the task drawers, chromebooks, play table tennis or board games or do art. I will teach the children the expectations around each of the things that they choose to use in terms of tidying up after and how to be respectful of the materials.

This is all just a rough idea of what will happen on day 2 and is likely to change. We usually have an assembly on a Friday morning so if this goes ahead, I will have to leave out an activity, probably the wordsearch but we will see on the day. Like I said in the Day 1 blog, I will also have filler activities at the ready should there be a need for them on the day. Lots of things from Day 1 like lining up practice, tidying up after lunch and so forth will also be repeated on this day but I didn’t feel the need to go into that again today. For more information on any of these or on ideas for filler activities check out my previous blog post about the first day in second class.

This post contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may make a commission. This is at no additional cost to you.

For many the first days back in school or indeed the first days in a new school can be incredibly daunting, even for seasoned teachers, there’s something about coming to back to school time that convinces you that you have forgotten everything about being in a classroom. I can’t tell you how many times I would raid twinkl the night before the children were due back, printing every back to school activity I could in case I needed it, only for it to sit gathering dust in the classroom. In this post I will take you through what I plan to do on the first day back in school with the children. Of course every class is different and plans can change, while this is my plan for day 1 now, it’s important to be flexible.

I am back in school on Wednesday 31st but the children aren’t back until Thursday 1st September. I teach 2nd class and they come from a junior school, so our school is completely new to them. That being said there is a lot that I will do on day 1 that might not be relevant for other second classes.

9.20 am Task Drawers & Attention Getters

If you have read my blog post on how I start my mornings, you will know that every morning in my class begins with a soft start. This will be no different on the first day of school. First thing on Thursday morning I will collect the class from yard and bring them up to the classroom. They will get to choose their own seats, if the seats they choose aren’t working for me I will designate seats on Monday when I know the children and see how they interact with each other.

This year my classroom is divided into four groups. The students will come in and pick a seat and when they do so I will give out a task drawer to each table. These will be lego, construction straws, gears and magnetic tiles. At the tables the students will have 30 minutes to play with these as I walk around to each group talking to the students and giving each of them a label with their name. I have chosen these particular tasks because it doesn’t require me to explain to the children how to use the items so I am free to chat to each of the children uninterrupted. It also gives all of the children time to chat to each other and catch up, many of the children will already know each other and some won’t. This is where as the teacher I can be introducing them to each other and starting up a conversation between them.

After circulating the classroom, chatting to the students and giving them a label, I start to teach the first procedure, getting their attention. This will be the most important procedure for me over the course of the next couple of days. I use lots of different ways of getting the students attention but on the first day I will be teaching 1, 2, 3, eyes on me, 1, 2, eyes on you. I begin by writing it on the board and getting the children to repeat it after me, explaining that when I need to tell them something I will use that callback. I let the children play again and during it this time I call out 1, 2, 3, eyes on me. When they repeat I praise them for their efforts and say this time when I call it, you have to repeat and then make sure your looking at me. Again they play and we try it again, this time looking to make sure they’re all looking at me. I then explain that the next time, they have to repeat, look at me and then put down whatever is in their hands. I let them play for a few minutes and try this out. We continue this a few more times, praising particular students each time for their response. I will also give out class dojo points to students or tables who are really making an effort with it at this point as this will encourage the others and it keeps them interested when practicing. Finally I say this time you’re going to repeat, look at me and put down anything in your hands, but you’re going to copy the voice I use. I then practice with them by whispering, shouting, speak in different voices.

When I feel the students have a good grasp on this I call it one final time, this time I explain to the students that we are going to tidy up. Again this is another important procedure, if you want students to do things to a standard you expect then you must explicitly teach it. For me tidying up looks like, all of the materials that a group were using are now back in the correct box in the middle of the table. They have checked the floor and area around them and there is nothing there. I will then show them the area where all of the task drawers go and ask the children what they notice about each one, I’ll explain that the numbers show them where they go. For today’s resources, I don’t need to explain any more than deconstruct what you made and put it in the drawer, other day’s there will be expectations around lids on play-doh, sweeping up after kinetic sand, and so on. Class Dojo will be your best friend here, give points out like there’s no tomorrow on the first day, it reinforces the behaviours that you want to see.

9.50 am 1, 2 & 3 Star Colouring & School Tour

Next I will split the class into 2 groups. Half of the group will go on a tour around the school with my support teacher. Most importantly they will be shown where the toilets are as they are not in our classroom and they will be taught the expectations for walking around the school. With the group that are in the classroom I will be doing mindful colouring. We will be doing this using the beautiful name colouring sheets from twinkl. Anything you can do that is personal to the child will make them feel at ease and they will get excited about.

However this also comes with expectations, on the first day in second my children will be using colouring pencils and crayons only, the markers will come later when I teach those expectations. For this I put up 3 different mindful colouring sheets on the board, I do each with a different name, mine, my support teacher and the principal. Each sheet will be coloured differently, I usually do the principals as the worst one as they get a laugh out of this. We look at the 3 colouring sheets and talk about how they are coloured and we mark each one, 1 star, 2 stars and 3 stars. For one it will be scribbled and the colouring will be outside the lines with little or no effort, the next one will be done a little neater but again leaving lots of it white and maybe not being as careful, the final one will have lots of colour, none of it will be left empty, the colouring will be neat and inside the lines. 1, 2, and 3 stars is how I will teach a lot of expectations throughout the year and it also gives the students a rubric to assess their own work. I will then give the students their name colouring and they can work on that until the other group come back and then we switch over and repeat.

10.15 am Lining Up Practice

Before the students have the chance to have yard, I always take them down to yard on the first day for 15 minutes to play. This is so that I can teach the children what the expectations are around lining up on yard. I explain that when the bell goes they must freeze and go down on one knee, then when they are called they walk quietly to the line. I do not have line leaders, I find this causes more arguments than solves them and it’s usually a teacher on yard that has to deal with the backlash of it. I bring my whistle to yard and tell the children to go play and anytime I blow the whistle, treat it as if it were the bell. We do this on and off for a about 10-15 minutes and then line up and go back to the classroom.

When we are back in the classroom I award points again for any students who impressed me on yard. I then practice how we are going to line up in the classroom. Here is where I will bring in the secret walker, I will explain to the students that every time we go to yard I will pick a secret walker, if the secret walker walked well in the line, quietly down to yard, they will get points for their table, if not the secret walker won’t be pointed out but I will announce that no points will be given. We practice lining up table by table then, seeing who can line up the quietest. When I am happy with the line, we head to yard for yard time.

11.10 am Read Aloud & First Day Feelings Activity

When the students finish eating and have tidied up (another expectation to be taught, I use the countdown music to represent tidy up time every day, saves me using my voice and the children know when they hear it their lunches need to go away), I teach the children about whole body listening, while I teach whole body listening, I do explain that listening looks different for different people and that how you focus is personal to you. However, listening is also a skill that needs to be taught and so some expectations are important. As the teacher, it is up to you to differentiate your expectations for the students in front of you, for example, I know that some of my students will need fidgets, or to move their legs or hands when they are listening, I know other students could be looking at a book or at something else in the room and still taking in every word I’m saying, I know that for some students to be comfortable they will sit in certain ways on their chair and do not ever expect students to sit cross legged on the floor, but all of this comes with getting to know the students and so the starting point we will begin with is whole body listening.

I use the poster above to explain what whole body listening looks like and what alternative listening and focus can look like too. This opens into a class discussion looks like for others. When the students have an understanding of this I introduce one of my favourite back to school books, The Pigeon Has to go to School! by Mo Willems. This book is all about a pigeon who is adamant that school isn’t for him. He lists all of the reasons why he doesn’t need to go to school, this being all of the things that he is worried about. In the end the pigeon comes to terms with the fact that school is great and he can’t wait to start. The children always seem to enjoy this as there is so much humour in it. Before starting the book, I will introduce some book talk, I point out the title, illustrations, spine, author and blurb. I don’t go into too much detail on this yet as I will do a lesson on it but I always reinforce the vocabulary when doing a read aloud. While the focus of this lesson won’t be comprehension strategies, it is about how we feel about starting school, I will talk about making connections to the pigeon in our talk afterwards but for the most part I won’t be pausing to question during the read aloud.

After the reading of the book we will talk about how we felt about starting our first day, if there was anything we were nervous about, what did we know about the school and class already, what they knew about me and each other, what they are excited about in second class, is there anything they want to learn or do or see. I will teach them a breathing technique during this time called Roller Coaster Breathing, where they use their finger to trace their hand, each time they trace up a finger they breathe in, and down a finger they breathe out.

Then we do an activity called First Day Feelings. This activity is free to download from my store. I go through the activity which includes colouring in the emojis that best represent their feelings about the first day of school, writing about how they felt and writing about something they are looking forward to in second class. After I have explained the worksheet, I will use a phrase I always, always use when giving out any kind of loose worksheet, ‘the first thing I do is always the same, I pick up my pencil and write my name’. The children will be saying this themselves after a week of listening to me. Despite this though, I do give constant reminders about names on sheets, especially at the beginning of the year when I don’t know the children’s handwriting. Any children who are finished this early can go back to their name mindful colouring as an early finisher. This will be something they will probably be going back and forth to over a week.

11.50 am Classroom Rules, expectations and reward system

When the children have all completed the First Day Feelings Worksheet, I will introduce the children to expectations. Together we will have a discussion about what they expect in a teacher, what I expect in a student, and what they expect in a classmate. I will make an anchor chart on this with the students. Each of them will have a say. Afterwards, looking at our chart, we will come up with a set of class rules. It is always so important to teach why you have each of the rules and what each of these looks like and not just what they are.

Next we will talk about our reward system, the students will have already been introduced to table points and individual points at this stage but during this time I will show them what it is they are working towards. I use the points on class dojo many different ways, especially during the first couple of months when I am really hammering home expectations and procedures. Firstly I do individual points where students can work towards a homework pass when they have 100 points. Next I do a whole class reward, we usually discuss what the class would like these to be, ice cream party, extra yard time, popcorn party, hot chocolate & PJ party, a trip to the park and so on, to be honest I usually work these around end of term parties like Halloween, Christmas, Easter and summer. These points roll over each week and are only reset during a new term.

I then use table points. Tables work together to earn points and the table that has the most points on a Friday get to have the Sharpies for the following week and get 15 minutes extra on yard at the end of the day on Monday. These points are reset each week.

The final thing that I use in my classroom for behaviour management is Golden Time. Golden Time happens for the last 45 minutes on a Friday and is essentially free play time for students. They can use any of the activities in my classroom, they can use chromebooks, play board games or do art. This is a reward for all of the hard work done throughout the week. All students start the week with 45 minutes of Golden Time, as the week goes on, if students aren’t being kind to each other, disrupting the class or in general being disrespectful, they can loose minutes. I always give students warnings before I take minutes away but once they have to be told again, they come up to my desk and write their name on a sheet, each time they loose another minute they tally it beside their name. When Friday comes, they sit out of Golden time for as many minutes as they lost. IF a student manages to loose 7 minutes during the week, they loose golden time that week and will catch up on other work during that time.

After explaining all of this we will practice lining up again in the class and the students will go to yard.

1.10 pm Gaeilge – Days of the Week

After lunch we will do the smallest bit of Irish. I won’t be introducing my full Irish lessons until the following week but I want to ensure that the students know the days of the week as this will become a daily practice for us. To teach them I will use the days of the week song to the tune of the Addam’s Family Music. I will teach the class the days of the week first, then the song, and then play a matching game on wordwall.

1.30 pm Read Aloud & Rainbow Get to Know Me Activity

Next I will read Perfectly Norman by Tom Percival. This book is all about a young boy called Norman who discovers he has wings. At first he tries to hide these but as the story continues he begins to embrace his uniqueness. I will use this book to talk about diversity and inclusion, to celebrate what makes us special and unique but also to talk about what makes us similar.

After our discussion I will show the children the Rainbow Cloud activity. We will go through each of the strips and I will model how to put it together. The purpose of this activity, as well as being a way to get to know the students, is to teach them the expectations with using a glue stick, how much to use, where to put the glue, how to wind it up and down and how to make sure the lid is on properly. This expectation for me is so important because the students will be using glue sticks for different things every day in my class. I will have the template cut out for the children because I want to teach them about scissors and cutting separately. Younger classes especially need to be reminded how to use the materials they are given, other wise you will find that after a month you have glue sticks with no lids, broken crayons, dried out markers and torn books. Teaching children how to use and look after the materials they are given will ensure that they last for the year.

Filler Activities

Filler activities are just that, there to fill time as it arises. Therefore I won’t timetable these into my day. I will be using Don’t Say It! and Would you Rather? as games throughout the day as I need to. Would you rather serves as a good movement break and Don’t Say It! is great if we have anything from 5 – 20 free minutes. Naturally activities on the first few days will run over or be finished quicker than expected, fillers like these game are handy to have on hand should you need them while you are getting to know your class and the time it takes to complete a lesson. Obviously you do not need these PowerPoints, these games can be played simply by writing a word on the board or by calling out options for would you rather and getting students to move to either side of the class.

Other good filler activities are GoNoodle but I would pick out and save your favourite videos so that you can go straight to them, students won’t agree on one video and chatting about it for too long or scrolling through videos only gives the class time to be distracted. Some good videos for a class who don’t like dancing are the Henry Danger videos on GoNoodle or the Run the Red Carpet ones.

Another one I use in my class is the Corner Game. This is just a movement break game. One student is chosen to stand or sit in the middle of the class. The student closes their eyes as the teacher counts down from 10. The rest of the students have to move as quickly and quietly to a corner of the room. When the countdown has finished, the student in the center of the room, still with their eyes closed, will point to one of the four corners, whoever is standing in that corner is out and has to sit down. The game continues until there is only 1 or 2 children left. If it gets to a point where there are 4 children left, they must all choose a different corner.

This post contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may make a commission. This is at no additional cost to you.