First Day of School Activities

Tomorrow marks the opening of classes for most schools. While the day can be marked with excitement, it can also be the most stressful and anxiety-provoking days for teachers, parents and students alike.

For my preschoolers, what I try to do to ease the stress is to welcome them to a warm and nurturing classroom, but not one that is too overwhelming and loud. Lucky for me, this year out of my nine enrolled students, eight of them were classmates last school year so the adjustment is less difficult.

Some activities I do to make the day fun are as follows:

• Name-tag making activities. Using pre-printed name plates, I allow my kids to decorate their name tags which I then place in their tabletops to mark their places.
• Parent-child singing activities. This is especially true for the younger kids. What I do is have mommy/daddy/yaya join us in a brief circle time session where we sing hello and introduce ourselves. Then, after a few minutes, I ask the adults to move to one side and just watch from that end. While this is happening, I discourage to much interaction and picture taking, but that’s quite difficult!
• My First Day of School Portraits. I let the kids draw their portraits about how they felt about their first day of school. For younger kids, I pre-print a happy face and just have them color it but for the older ones, I let them draw free hand. We also take pictures that we can print later on.

One thing that really helps with the adjustment to the first day of school is to have parents be relaxed about the idea of leaving their kids behind. Remember, parents, if you are anxious, the kids feed off of this

Have a good first day of school!

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