6 Must-Try Back to School Lessons: My Favorite Back-to-School Activities

I hope that you had, or are having, the most amazing summer break ever. For me, my break is over because my first day of school is this week. Wow! How did it all go by so quickly? By now the end-of-summer dread is over, and I am excited to be back in the classroom with a fresh batch of students.

Here are six essential back to school lessons I’ll be using in my classroom this back-to-school season.

Back to School Lessons: First Day of School Stations

One way to set the tone for an engaging school year is to begin the school year with a Back-to-School Stations activity that helps you get to know your new students and allows your students to get to know the class.

Get to know your new students with an engaging first week of school activity! Back to School Stations! This back-to-school station activity will help you and your students get to know one another for the new school year. Plus, these stations, which are great for the first day of school, also help students get organized!

Back to School Lessons: Activities for the First Few Weeks

This back-to-school resource packet has so many great activities and icebreakers for you to use. My favorite activity is a collaborative quilt. Students love contributing their square to the quilt, and it helps brighten your classroom from the first week of school.

This Back-to-School Activities Packet is ideal for middle and high school students, and it is filled with beginning-of-the-year ice breakers and activities you and your students will love!

You and your students will get to know each other and start the school year on the right foot with these beginning-of-the-year activities. These 11 first-week-of-school activities are designed to help students get to know each other and become more familiar with the class.

Back to School Lessons: AI and Academic Integrity

With AI now a very active part of the educational space, it is imperative to establish clear AI expectations at the very start of the school year. I designed my AI and Academic Integrity unit with a heavy academic integrity focus.

This unit walks students through the five tenets of academic integrity and what artificial intelligence is. It focuses on how AI use in the classroom either aligns with or goes against academic integrity standards. It also teaches students the proper ways to use AI in the classroom (hint: it is with meticulous citations and clearly stating that AI was used in the assignment).

Back to School Lessons: Growth Mindset Escape Room

What better way to introduce a growth mindset and encourage collaboration than challenging your students to an escape room activity during the first week of school? This growth mindset escape room includes multiple tasks and challenges for students to unlock as they learn about growth mindset, goal setting, and famous failures.

This activity will help you facilitate conversations about perseverance, commitment, and achievement!

Back to School Lessons: Email Etiquette

Without fail, students fill our inbox with horribly written emails. It’s a considerable teacher pet peeve and annoyance, but so often we forget that this can be a teachable moment. Last year I taught this email etiquette mini-unit during the first week of school, and it was a complete game-changer. About 99% of the student emails I received were pleasant, polite, and well-formatted.

By teaching students how to write an email, they will know how to write an email to a teacher, boss, or superior. Email etiquette is an essential skill that students need to know, and after teaching this email etiquette unit, you’ll receive much more pleasant emails.

Back to School Lessons: Sentence Combining Bell Ringers

I am a stickler for routines, especially routines that are meaningful and help students become better writers. I highly encourage teachers to include some form of sentence combining in their curriculum because it helps students actively focus on improving their syntax and writing.

There are enough sentence combining bell ringers in this resource for the entire school year, and by spending just five minutes a day on combining sentences, your students’ writing will improve exponentially.

Free Back-to-School Student Survey

If there is one thing that you should definitely do the first week of school, you should spend some time getting to know your new students. Here is my FREE back-to-school survey that will help you get to know your new students.