After 11 years of first days of school, I’ve learned that the first week fills itself up whether you plan it or not. Organizing supplies, going over dismissal procedures, assigning lockers, sharing the schedule…they’ll take every minute you give them. As the teacher, my job is to decide what gets protected before all of that moves in.
That’s the whole philosophy behind the schedule I’m sharing today, built on Stephen Covey’s “Big Rocks” metaphor: put the big stuff first, before the smaller, more urgent-feeling tasks crowd it out. I call this list of priorities my Big Rocks First Week, five must-do’s I protect before anything else pushes its way into the schedule:
- Establishing a strong classroom community with expectations for belonging, inclusion, and personal growth
- Creating an environment where everyone loves to read and establishing the routines and norms we need in reader’s workshop
- Introducing the concept of a growth mindset
- Administering my spelling inventory so that I have some assessment data for beginning word study
- Getting those writer’s notebooks decorated so students love their journals
When you read through my schedule and what I plan to accomplish during the first week of school, you will see that my plans are literacy heavy and discussion heavy. I do A LOT of reading aloud during the first week of school.
FAQ: How do I balance SEL and community-building with everything else I need to accomplish that first week?
Structure your week around a small number of protected priorities instead of trying to fit everything in equally. My Big Rocks First Week approach protects five priorities, community and belonging, love of reading, growth mindset, spelling assessment, and writer’s notebooks, before all of the other subjects take over.
This schedule spans the first two weeks. I’ve labeled each section by week.
PRIORITY 1: BUILDING CLASSROOM COMMUNITY (WEEK 1-2)
You’ll notice that my plans are intentionally discussion-heavy from day one. Research on classroom community shows that a student’s sense of belonging in their classroom leads to a more positive connection with school, along with stronger self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation. When students feel accepted and respected, they feel safe taking the intellectual risks needed in a learning environment.
FAQ: When should I start teaching math and core curriculum content?
During the first week of school, I need some extra time and I free that up by not starting my heavy core subjects like math and science yet. We can start those subjects in week 2, once our community routines and ELA blocks are in place. Most of your first week should be spent in building community, reading life, and routines instead, because students who feel safe and know your routines engage with new content faster than ones still figuring out where the pencils go. Investing your time this way during week one will pay off.
WHY I START THE YEAR WITH BELONGING AND INCLUSION
I run theme-based morning meetings, which means my social emotional learning time isn’t just a rotating set of greetings and share sessions. Each theme gets a full 3-4 week unit built around picture books, quotations, videos, vocabulary, discussion, and student journaling. I’ve got 16 themes I teach across the year this way, everything from kindness and empathy to growth mindset, perseverance, responsibility, managing emotions, courage, and friendship. If you want the full breakdown of how the framework works, I’ve written about the theme-based morning meeting framework here.
But the first two weeks of school belong to one theme: belonging, and specifically teaching students to be includers.
I start here on purpose. Before students can do the harder social-emotional work of the other 15 themes, they need to know this classroom is a place where nobody gets left out. Belonging is the foundation of our interactions with one another. If students don’t feel a responsibility to including everyone, everything we do this year will be harder.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS DURING MORNING MEETING
Morning meeting isn’t a single lesson type. My theme units move through five phases, and knowing which phase you’re in tells you the focus of each day:
1. Launching the theme. I open a new unit with a read aloud, a quotation, or a video, and I deliberately don’t tell students the theme upfront. I want to hear what they notice first. This takes 1-2 days.
2. Introducing the theme, self-reflection, and goal setting. Now I name the theme and define the key vocabulary, posting both on our morning meeting bulletin board so we can reference them all unit. Students complete a self-reflection with rating scales that get them thinking honestly about where they stand, then set one personal goal for the unit. We set a whole-class goal too, usually after our first big discussion.
3. Student discussion. Students get a journal page with three discussion questions and space to illustrate. They jot ideas independently first, which is the single biggest thing I’ve found that improves discussion quality, more students participate when they’ve had a minute to think. Then we discuss as a whole group and I build anchor charts to capture their ideas.
4. Building the theme. This is the longest phase. We keep layering on read alouds (at least 3 per theme), videos, quotations, and journaling. Students start making connections between texts on their own.
5. Consolidating. We put the pieces together: students check back in on the goal they set, we chart text-to-text connections across the stories we’ve read, and we do a final reflection on a quotation. This is where the big ideas get pulled out and where I’m quietly hitting ELA standards like theme, character analysis, making connections, and comparing how different authors treat the same idea.
WEEK 1-2 BELONGING UNIT SCHEDULE
- Day 1: Launch the theme. Read aloud Big Al by Andrew Clements. Discuss what happens to Big Al and why.
- Day 2: Name the theme and define vocabulary (belonging, inclusion, exclusion). Post to the bulletin board. Students set up their morning meeting journals.
- Day 3: Self-reflection and personal goal setting. Students rate their sense of belonging and history of including others and set one goal for the unit. This is where I set the class goal and expectation that we included others.
- Day 4-5: Discussion phase. Journal page with three questions, then whole-group discussion and anchor charts.
- Week 2: Building phase. Read aloud Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson and Babushka Baba Yaga by Patricia Polacco. Students start comparing how each character experiences exclusion. Add in a video and a quotation analysis.
- End of Week 2: Consolidating. Compare and contrast to make text-to-text connections across all three books. Students revisit their goal and reflect on how they did.
Throughout both weeks, I remind students at lunch and recess to make sure everyone is included and nobody feels like a “Big Al.” That phrase becomes shorthand as a reminder to be inclusive. I use the unstructured time during lunch and recess to watch how students actually interact with one another, which helps me decide on what themes will be important to teach early on this year.
Other community-building tasks that fit here: brainstorming necessary classroom jobs (usually later in week one, once students have seen what our needs actually are) and giving students time to complete job applications.
FAQ: Is there a free resource to start building classroom belonging right away?
The Belonging theme unit is completely free, including teacher lesson plans, student journal pages, self-reflections, discussion prompts, and bulletin board materials. It’s the unit I use for the first three weeks of school. Grab the unit so you can implement it in your own classroom.
Get your FREE Sense of Belonging Unit!
Get all of the resources mentioned in this post and you’ll be ready to create a classroom community that understands belonging and knows how to include others!
PRIORITY 2: CREATING A POSITIVE READING ENVIRONMENT (WEEK 1 INTO WEEK 2)
The main focus of my first Reading Unit is in teaching students how to build a reading life and how to carve out time for daily reading. Along with the minilesson focuses below, I also teach lessons that help my students get ready for the routines and procedures of our reading workshop. These include: learning how our library is organized, discussing when it’s appropriate to choose books, giving them time to search through book bins and make a list of books they might like to read, having them choose three books to place in their book boxes to get ready for my “choosing just right books” lesson, setting up reading journals, and learning how to come to the carpet and what norms we will follow while there.
WEEK 1: LAUNCHING BUILDING A READING LIFE
- MONDAY: Launch Building a Reading Life unit. Discuss and journal “Reading is the Worst for Us When.” Read aloud half of Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair by Patricia Polacco.
- TUESDAY: Journal and discuss “Why Read?” Students complete an “I read because…” journal page. Finish Aunt Chip.
- WEDNESDAY: Why Read? Reading is Freedom. Read aloud Richard Wright and the Library Card by William Miller.
- THURSDAY: “Reading is the Best for Us When” journal page and anchor chart.
- FRIDAY: Read aloud A Quiet Place by Douglas Wood. Discuss the best spaces for reading. Students journal and sketch their ideal reading space at home.
Quick Tip: Make a checklist of all of the routines you need to address for readers workshop. Put them in the order that you think makes sense to teach and discuss. For example, if you gather students at the carpet, teaching how to move to the carpet, what materials to bring, and what “carpet manners” we need to follow to allow everyone to learn should be high on the list. Check them off as you get to them throughout the week. This allows you the flexibility to discuss something when it feels natural while also hitting the important stuff as needed.
Grab your free “Building a Reading Life” Minilesson
Let’s help students build a reading life! I’ll send you the “Reading is the WORST for Us When…” minilesson notes, anchor charts and student journal pages for the first lesson! Just subscribe below for your plans to help students build an amazing reading life this year! 
WEEK 2: LAUNCH WRITING WORKSHOP
During week two, I launch my Penciling in a Worthwhile Writing Life unit, where students verbalize their best and worst writing experiences. It deliberately mirrors the Building a Reading Life unit from week one, so students see the same reflective structure applied to writing.
FAQ: Where can I find ready-made resources for launching reader’s workshop and writer’s workshop the first week?
The Launching Reader’s Workshop and Launching Writer’s Workshop guides walk through the exact minilesson sequences referenced in this post, including the Building a Reading Life and Penciling in a Worthwhile Writing Life units. Both are built to mirror each other, so once one is launched, the second follows a structure students already recognize.
DONE-FOR-YOU LITERACY RESOURCES
PRIORITY 3: INTRODUCING GROWTH MINDSET (WEEK 1 INTO WEEK 2)
Growth mindset gets its own spot on my list. While Belonging is about how my students treat each other, growth mindset is about whether or not they believe in themselves and will try hard when things are challenging. I want my students to understood the research behind growth mindsets, the difference between fixed and growth mindsets, and learn how to re-frame negative thinking. I also want them to realize that this school year is a fresh start and they have the opportunity to grow more, regardless of their past school experiences.
I never manage to fit my growth mindset lesson into day one, but I am sure to get this conversation started on day two, often using my science block (perfect since I’m teaching students how their brain works!)
FAQ: How do I fit growth mindset instruction into an already packed first week without it feeling like an extra lesson?
Give it its own time on the schedule. I start on day two with one lesson a day, and I don’t try to squeeze it into another block to save minutes. It stops feeling like an add-on once you stop treating it like one, and honestly, growth mindset earns that slot as much as anything else I’m teaching that week. Learning to say “I can’t do this yet” instead of “I can’t do this” is the same kind of work as learning to include the kid nobody sits with at lunch. It’s just pointed inward.
WHAT I ACTUALLY TEACH THE FIRST TWO WEEKS
Before I teach my full SEL growth mindset unit later in the year, I pair a handful of pieces from it with Angela Watson’s growth mindset materials.
I pull the following activities from my own unit, all focused on helping us create shared language around growth mindset:
- The growth mindset versus fixed mindset sort, so students can actually name the difference instead of nodding along to a definition
- The vocabulary for our bulletin board: growth mindset, fixed mindset, neuroplasticity, effort, resilience, perseverance, posted where we can point at it all year
- The Power of Yet brainstorming exercise, which is an important distinction that I want in their heads before the first genuinely hard assignment
- Growth mindset affirmations, so when a student is stuck, they’ve got something to say to themselves that isn’t “I’m bad at this”
Angela’s structured lesson plans fill in around those activities with short videos and discussion questions. Her lessons run 30-45 minutes and the videos are brief enough that I show each one twice.
What made this work in my classroom wasn’t the packaging on either resource. It was that my students could connect the “not yet” language to their own frustration with a hard math problem or a stuck piece of writing, and I watched them support one another using “the power of yet” by week three.
That reframe is central to the growth mindset research this whole approach is built on. Carol Dweck has pioneered the study of the mindsets that influence students’ academic achievement, and her work, most notably the National Study of Learning Mindsets, which followed 12,000 students across 65 US schools, has shaped how growth mindset gets taught in classrooms nationally.
Now, I want to be fair about the research here. Some studies that tried to replicate Dweck’s findings came back with weaker results than the original work suggested, and that’s worth knowing if you’re going to teach this. I’m careful not to present growth mindset to my students as some kind of guarantee. It’s one more thing they can reach for when something is hard. From my own classroom, I can tell you that encouraging a growth mindset changed the way my students talked about failure and felt about their own abilities.
THE FULL UNIT COMES LATER
Somewhere in the middle of the year, usually when I can feel students starting to plateau or get discouraged, I teach the whole Growth Mindset SEL unit as one of my 16 morning meeting themes. That’s 20 days of lessons with read alouds like The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, Your Fantastic Elastic Brain, I Can’t Do That Yet, and Bubble Gum Brain, plus the journal activities that goes deeper than anything I can fit into the first two weeks.
Teaching it twice, lightly in the first two weeks and fully mid-year, means the language never goes stale. Students already own the vocabulary by the time we do the deep work, so the full unit builds on something we’ve already discussed and have been practicing.
Growth Mindset Unit
Teach students to see mistakes and challenges as opportunities to grow!
Implementing SEL just got so much easier! 20 days of lesson plans, suggested read alouds, student notebooks, and a growth mindset focused bulletin board ready to print and teach!
PRIORITY 4: ADMINISTER MY SPELLING INVENTORY (WEEK 1)
While I don’t do a lot of formal assessments during the first week of school, I am sure to squeeze in my Engaged Spelling Inventory (aligned to WTW).
This inventory builds on the 24-word Words Their Way inventory and contains 64 words spanning the Late Letter-Name Alphabetic Stage, Within Word Pattern, Syllables and Affixes, and the Derivational Relations Stage. It gives me specific insight into the instructional level of my students down to which word study unit they are ready to start. I break this assessment into 3 sessions of 15-20 minutes. I recently added a PowerPoint with a clipart clue that makes administering this spelling inventory more pleasant. (Wait, what word was that? I missed one! Can you repeat that again? 
)
PRIORITY 5: DECORATING WRITER’S NOTEBOOKS (WEEK 1)
During the first week of school, my writer’s workshop plans provide us a time to reflect, get creative, and a guaranteed moment of calm during our busy days of getting our classroom up and running. Students learn about Heart Mapping, tap into people, places, and events that are important to them, and decorate their writing notebooks throughout this week.
A heart map is a visual brainstorm of things that are important to us—a map of our hearts— and for students this age, provide ideas for topics that they may later write about. The idea of heart-mapping can be linked back to author Georgia Heard. She talks about heart mapping in this video if you want to learn more.
Students map out the people, places, and things that matter to them, and that map becomes the idea bank they pull from every time I ask them to write something the rest of the year. The notebook decorating happens in the last half of the week, and by Friday students have a notebook that represents them and a page full of things they actually want to write about.
WEEK 1 HEART MAPPING SCHEDULE:
- MONDAY: Introduce heart mapping. Share my own “About Me” slideshow and heart map. Students start lists in their writer’s notebooks: people and pets they love, places they love, things they love or love to do, fears.
- TUESDAY: Sketch and plan heart maps.
- WEDNESDAY: Search magazines for images connected to heart maps.
- THURSDAY: Cover writer’s notebooks with magazine collages.
- FRIDAY: Illustrate and color heart maps. I save this for Friday, or even Friday afternoon, to build in some quiet, calm time before the weekend.
After students are finished decorating their notebooks, my job (and hopefully a handful of volunteers) is to cover them with contact paper to help them last all year.
Our writer’s notebook work is one of the big rocks I try my best to accomplish during week 1 because if notebook decorating drags into week 2 and 3, it becomes a major time suck. A personalized writer’s notebook helps students take ownership of their writing and makes their most important tool (the notebook) super special to them. We’ll be able to grow the fruits of our labor during writing workshop as the year goes on.
IDEAS FOR THE LAST 30 MINUTES OF THE DAY
Once the five Big Rocks are covered for the day, I keep a running checklist of things I’ve remembered we need to do, or want to get to, and use the last half hour to work through it. This is a great time to make sure students have a book to take home, let them browse the classroom library, play math games, or finish something from earlier in the day.
I’ve used this free Multiplication Game from The Teacher Studio. It’s a good tool for observing who’s solid on their multiplication facts and how students interact with each other, I’d suggest mixing up partners each time you use it so you get a wider read on group dynamics. At some point during the week, I’ll also use this time to help students set up their binders. I take students’ dividers from them and write on the tabs myself. This is such a sanity and class-time saver–and all of the dividers end up in order, right-side up, and legible.
WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS BY THE END OF WEEK ONE
My best advice for planning your first week back to school is to be sure to get the time consuming stuff done early on. That’s covering writer’s notebooks (contact paper and all), setting up binders, completing any crucial assessments, and organizing reading journals with the sections you want. Those tasks eat up entire afternoons, and they’re much harder to squeeze in once real instruction starts.
FAQ: What’s the biggest mistake teachers make when planning their first week of school?
Treating the first week as review time or diving straight into curriculum content, rather than protecting it for community and routines. After 11 years of first days I realize that kids will always sit through more teacher talk and directions than any of us would like that week. What determines whether the rest of the year goes smoothly is whether that time built toward genuine community and clear routines, not whether content got covered.
My real goals for the week come down to two things: I want my students to understand that I expect an inclusive classroom where everyone is respected, included, and treated with care, no one should ever feel like a “Big Al”. And I want them to understand that building a reading life full of passion for stories and books matters, and that I’ll be right there helping them fall for it.
If I have ended my first week of school and accomplished those two things, I can rest easy and let go of the stress of all the things I didn’t accomplish. If I have kind students who are working as a team, who are eager to build the best reading lives ever, and who are putty in my hands when I read aloud, who go home telling their parents they had a great day at school, I know it is going to be a great year!
