First Week of School Lesson Plans Made Easy!

Lesson planning for the first week of school can be intimidating! In past years, I have written, erased, deleted, rewritten, printed, and thrown away lesson plan ideas. This was before I came up with a First Week of School Lesson Planning Formula that worked for me in lower elementary! Now I want to share that with you! Your first week of school should have one main focus: establishing your classroom community. This will set up your classroom relationships, your behavior management, and your classroom procedures. Keep reading as I outline my plan for your back to school lesson plans!

I have created for you a free First Week of School Lesson Plan Template that will help you with the formula I am about to outline! Click the picture to download it! There are several options and formats included in the download. You can see more if you click the picture and view it on Teachers Pay Teachers.

First Week of School Lesson Plan Outline

Let’s get into it! I want to help you streamline your back to school lesson planning and save you hours of trying to figure it out! Below is the formula that works best for me. This outline will establish a confident classroom structure, and give you lots of time to connect and build relationships with your new class!

What to include in each day of your First Week of School Lesson Plans:

• Morning Meeting or Morning Activity
• Focus Read Aloud
• Reading Centers
• Math Centers
• Procedures

That’s it! And trust me, it will truly take up your entire day. Let’s get into what you might include in each section.

Morning Meeting

Start the day off on the right foot! Now that you have the outline for the first week of school, lets start filling in the blanks. On each day, pick a morning meeting activity to do after the kiddos have entered the classroom. You could do a craft, fill out an All About Me page, take a tour of the school, make Jitter Juice, the ideas are endless! I have created a partner pairing card set to quickly break your class into groups of two for a partner conversation starter during your morning meeting! Click the image to get it! I have a blog post all about these partner paring cards here: My Favorite Classroom Management Strategy.

Back to School Read Aloud Books

Next, you need to pick a focus read aloud book for each day! This will be a book you read that you then follow with a few activities. Examples would include “First Day Jitters” by Julie Danneberg, “Peanut Butter and Cupcake” by Terry Border, “Our Class is a Family” by Shannon Olsen, “The Name Jar” by Yangsook Choi, and “School’s First Day of School” by Adam Rex. I have created a few packets of read aloud activities that you can grab on my TPT. Click the image to head that way!

I have a full blog post on back to school read alouds! Click the picture to read it!

Reading Centers

I cannot stress this enough: the first week of school is for building community and establishing routines and procedures! Read that again! That means that you should not be breaking students into reading groups and start your reading teaching this week! If students are going to be spending any amount of time in your classroom working independently, they need to learn how to do it first! You have to teach them how to do centers, how to clean up, how to rotate, how to use technology and more! To introduce this, start with easy reading centers that students can rotate through this first week.

Examples include:

• Alphabet puzzles
• Free write station
• Build classmates’ names with letter tiles (write classmates’ names on index cards)
• Back to school coloring page
• Technology center (model first)
• Color by letter
• Matching games

Math Centers

Same thing goes for math rotations!
Now is the chance to introduce and teach your class how to rotate, use materials, clean up, and work with partners. If you jump in teaching small groups, you wont be able to monitor them closely and correct behavior. This will save you so much headache later. Plus, classroom behavior will be better in the long run. Click the picture to grab a free math center.

Math center examples (so many of these can be found on TPT or Pinterest!) :

• Number bump (see above)
• Counting with blocks
• Counting with bears
• Hundred Chart activity
• Number sense game
• Dice game

Procedures

Lastly, let’s talk about procedures. In the lesson planning freebie that I made for you, I gave you a box that has the heading “Procedure.” These are all the rules, expectations, and routines that you will teach in a given day. The list is meant to be taught alongside everything else. You will have morning routines that you teach during your morning meetings. You will have technology routines that you teach during reading centers. You will also have class values that you will teach. Some extra read aloud books that I love for this include ” A Bad Case of Tattle Tongue” by Julia Cook, “The Jelly Donut Difference” by Maria Dismondy, and “Spaghetti in a Hot Dog Bun” also by Maria Dismondy. Start listing the procedures you want to teach your students and pair them with the activities you have planned.

That’s it!

I wish you the best as you get ready to head back to school! I hope that these tips and ideas have made your planning easier. My goal here at Bugs and Buttercups is to give you back some of your planning time and let you focus more on what really matters: your classroom relationships.

One More Thing!

Just recently, I finished a new bundle of back to school writing and craft activities! Here is another set of activities to make your first week of school much easier. Each project is paired with a common read aloud, comes with plenty of writing templates, and a fun craft! Click the picture to check it out!