With the first day of school just around the corner for many, your planning may be well under way. What community building activities will you be implementing for those first few days?

Here are a few ideas that I’ve found success with in years past:

• Develop classroom community guidelines (aka rules) as a group. Start by having a classroom discussion about what the atmosphere should look, feel, and sound like throughout the day. Talk about how people and the environment should be treated. Put out big sheets of paper with titles on each (e.g. “respect for environment,” “respect for classmates and teachers”) and give students sticky notes. When directed, students write examples for each topic and place them on the posters. Discuss the results as a group, have the guidelines written up, and post them in the classroom.
• Play some icebreaker games and have some fun together! Minute to win it challenges are always a hit. We’ve also done team challenges, such as the newspaper tower game, giving each team some newspaper and masking tape. Each group makes the tallest structure they can using just those materials in 15 minutes.  Another game that we’ve played before is this interactive listening game. Students have to listen for their clues then act them out. Be prepared for some goofiness!

Interactive Listening Game

• Provide time for a get-to-know you activity. The first day of school we like to give this fun homework: bring a bag in the next day with four items that represent you. The teachers already have a mystery bag about themselves ready to go and introduce the activity by sharing their bags. (Examples of what I’ve had in my bag include a package of ground coffee, a photo of a place I’ve traveled, the book I was currently reading, and a key chain that has my children’s names on it). In the morning, children discreetly place their bags in the predetermined bin without others seeing what their bags look like. During morning meeting, and other group times throughout the week, we share a few bags and students guess whose items are in the bag. The children have three guesses to figure out who the bag belongs to and if nobody guesses correctly, the bag owner reveals him or herself. Then the mystery bag owner shares a bit about why those items are important to him or her.  It’s a fun, easy way to learn details about your students and to find kids with similar interests pretty quickly.

I hope you’ve found these community building ideas for the first week of school helpful! What community building activities will you be trying this year?