It’s important to make the students feel welcome and comfortable when they enter the classroom on the first day of the day or boarding school. Students should feel their classroom like a second home as they spend their majority of the day there. Given below are the ways how you can welcome students after summer vacations;
Send Home a Welcome Packet
Introduce yourself by sending home a welcome letter, a week before school starts. To have students and their parents connect with you ask in the letter about things like do you have any pet or things you like to do outside school, etc. You may also specify the information regarding the class schedule and rules, supplies needed, expectations from them, etc. this welcome letter will help to alleviate the first day jitters and will prepare them ahead of time.
Create an Inviting Classroom
Creating an inviting classroom is another easiest way to welcome students. To make students feel comfortable and warm when they enter the classroom, they should be engaged in activities like classroom decoration and encouraged to create projects and drawings for the classroom display board.
Conduct a teacher interview
Students may have a few questions once they get to the classroom even after providing some basic information about yourself. So for this, you can conduct an interview for which you can ask students to pair up and prepare questions. After the interview is over, ask the students to gather up and choose their favorite question and answer to share it with the whole class.
Provide a Story
Set the mood of each student in the beginning on the first day of school, by telling them a story. Sometimes in the first few weeks, students feel uneasy and insecure. To help such students choose a different story each morning and thus make them feel comfortable. Students can tell about how they are feeling with the help of books, as books are very helpful in opening up communication.
Create a Scavenger Hunt
Creating a scavenger hunt is another way to help students to know their new classrooms. You can create pictured clues for younger students which they need to find. You may also include book corners, puzzles, etc. however, for the older students, you can create a checklist mentioning look for classroom duster, homework basket, etc. after the scavenger hunt is completed, hand the winning team their prize.
Provide ice breaker activities
When students do not find any familiar faces on the first day of school, they feel very uneasy. To alleviate their first day jitters, provide a few ice breaker activities like a scavenger hunt, trivia, “two truths and a lie”, etc.
