The first week of school can be petrifying for both teachers and students. Why not make the first week of school fun instead of following the daily teaching routine? Here are some fun activities for first week of school in 2nd grade. As a teacher, it will be your responsibility to make kids more responsible, but without scaring them.
We are here with some activities you can organize during the first week of school for your second-grade students.
Ideas and Activities for First Week of School in 2nd Grade – Our List
Have a Plan for the Day
An unplanned day can be a real mess, especially if you are handling small kids. The first thing you can do right from the start of the academic year is to make a proper plan for students and regularly follow the plan. Although students will take some time to follow the plan properly, it will eventually become more comfortable for them to handle toddlers.
Morning Routine
A teacher must keep their students busy somewhere when they are taking their attendance or counting their lunch boxes and bags. Imagine a situation where you are trying to take attendance while kids tell you about their dog or the beautiful butterfly they saw yesterday.
It will become disturbing for you to calm them and focus on taking their attendance. You can try to plan a morning routine for students. Make charts or posters and hang them all over the classroom. The posters will contain the directions; they need to follow each day they come to school.
You can make a map that indicates a particular place to submit their lunchboxes, homework, or notes in posters. In this way, you will keep everything organized, and students will develop good habits in themselves.
You can encounter some trouble starting, but eventually, kids will become habitual, and it will become easier to manage their morning routine.
Dismissal Routine
Similar to the morning routine, you can also prepare a dismissal routine for your students. For example, ask them to collect their homework folder, empty lunchboxes, pack their bags, and make a queue. If students start following the dismissal routine, it will become easier for you to handle them during dismissal.
Again, you can make some posters that can directly guide students to follow their dismissal routine properly.
Ice Breakers and Games
Snow Ball Fight
The first week of school is all about fun, no need to worry about lengthy lectures or exhausting homework. Just go to school and chill.
Snowball fight is one of the coolest classroom fun activities kids can do during their first week of school. All you need to do is to write three things about yourself and crumble the piece of paper so that it started looking like a snowball. Start a song and let them enjoy the paper snowball fight.
Stop the music as soon as the song ends. Ask your students one by one to unroll the snowball they had in their hands and start reading the facts written on that paper. Others in the meanwhile can guess whose paper is this.
I am sure kids are going to love this small yet unique snowball fight, and they will also get to know some facts about each other. Reading facts about each other and guessing the name of the student can also be fun.
Students will not just interact with each other this way, but they will also build an understanding and bond with their classmates in the first week of school.
Me and We Book
After the snowball fight, you can ask kids to spend some me-time with a story or picture book. I prefer to keep some books in my classroom so that I can make small groups of two or three students and give them a book to work on. While distributing pages, I always take care to group lower-achieving students in groups of three to avoid excessive pressure on their shoulders on the first day of school.
In the ME and We book, kids have two different columns in front of them, named WE and ME. If all the team members have something in common, they can write that in the WE section. But if they have some differences, they can put that point in the ME section.
It is the perfect way to gather two or three students together, helping them explore the things they have in common and, more commonly, get to know each other well.
While kids are writing their pages together, you can call them individually in teams and click their first-day photograph.
Me and We books can be an ideal way to let students understand each other, spend some time together, discuss each other habits, and ultimately become the friend of each other.
Kids will enjoy filling out the ME and WE pages. You can group kids with different students and ask them to serve one Page of the Me, and We book for the whole week. In this way, one student will get to know more than six students in a week.
All About Me
Everyone has a lot to tell about themselves. As its name suggests, all About Me is a fun activity where kids can write or draw something that expresses themselves as an individual. They can share their write-ups or draw with others and share some stories they want to share with everyone else in the class.
You can ask them how they spend their vacation. Or what new things they learned during the holidays?
All these things will boost the confidence of your student and will encourage them to speak up. Apart from this, you will get to know about your students. Students will get to know each other.
It is the perfect classroom activity at the start of school. You can also ask students to share something good or bad about any one of their classmates. This activity is also going to be fun. You will get to know what your students think about each other or you.
All these activities at the start of the academic year will help your students create a bond with each other and stay energized, happy all over the year.
Scavenger Hunt
If you want to take the hidden Sherlock Holmes out of your second-grade students, then a scavenger hunt is the best way you will be able to achieve your task.
Divide the class into teams, give them the name of a few things, and ask them to hunt for those things all over the classroom. I am sure kids are going to enjoy their search with their classmates.
Whosoever finds all the things fastest wins the Scavenger hunt. For encouraging kids, even more, you can also announce a prize that the winning team will get. It will encourage kids to actively participate in the hunt, and coordinate with their team members to win the game.
If you want to make a bond among your students and teach them the importance of unity and coordination, then the Scavenger hunt is the most excellent way. The more they coordinate with each other, the more will be their chances of winning.
Trivia
Trivia is another enjoyable, fun activity that can fulfill kids with enthusiasm and excitement. Divide the class into two or four teams, depending on the students you have in class. Shoot some basic questions to the groups one by one. Keep a count of the score of each team. In the end, the team with the maximum score wins the game.
To make it even more interesting, you can also announce some prizes for the winning team. Kids will then participate in the quiz with even more excitement. Although it is not the best way to understand every student, you can get a basic idea about super-active and in-active students in the class with trivia.
You will also get an idea about the area to focus on more during the academic year.
Ideas and Activities for First Week of School in 2nd Grade – Wrapping Up
The teacher plays a crucial role in building kids’ interest in the school right from the first day of school. You can just start teaching students from the first day of school. The first week is to build a basic understanding of your students and class, and with all the activities mentioned above, you will be able to do so.