Free First Week Back to School Middle School Plans (Part 1)

Happy end of August (how did that happen??). It’s hard to believe we’re having to think about back to school plans

Warning…this is little bit longer than my 500 word rule, but it contains FREE back to school plans for your middle school classroom, so I hope that you can forgive me.

I saw this great tweet the other day that I just had to share. 

Anyone else feeling like this? 

One thing that is making me feel better though, is knowing that I am prepared with my back to school week 1 plan (not including planning time type subjects, such as music, gym or French), which I am going to share with you today (P.S. I seem to always overplan …but this list will give me at least a starting point).

Back to school plans for day 1

  • Community circle: Start community circle “bellwork” routine for building community, communication, collaboration and working on curriculum expectations throughout the school year. (Here is a FREE two week sample!) Discuss something each student is looking forward to and something they are nervous about for the upcoming school year.
  • Math: Math about me – share facts about yourself with your students using math sentences. Then have students design their own pages.
  • Read Aloud: I Promise by Lebron James (I ordered this from Amazon and can’t wait to get it!) We will discuss what a promise is, how important they are and brainstorm promises we need to make to each other to create a community promise.
  • Classroom Setup: Show students zones check-in. Discuss zones and how difficult this past year was for many of us. Explain the anonymous nature of this check in (I am going to use numbers, rather than names). 

back to school plans for Day 2

  • Community circle: Day 2: Discuss things we can and things we can not control in our life to continue our conversation on our zones check in. 
  • Math: Continue math about me 
  • Art: Snapshots of Me Camera (FREE). This is not mine. I found it on Pinterest. Unfortunately for me, the blog is in Polish and I am unable to read it, but I LOVE the idea and want to give credit. My students will draw pictures of their family, what they like to do, their summer…whatever is special to them, as well as decorate the camera.
  • Read Aloud: The Golden Rule by Ilene Cooper: Discuss how the golden rule relates to our collaborative classroom promise. We will try to come up with one main theme for our promise. I like using RESPECT as the theme, though I will let the students decide. Here is a FREE copy of the poster I created for this, in which my students signed. I will modify it depending on what my students come up with this year. 
  • Classroom setup: Brainstorm classroom responsibilities. I like to have one job per student. Then we rotate every two weeks (or whatever works based on the number of students you have). I do this so that everyone contributes to the classroom. It also ensures that everyone has the opportunity to try each job and they can not complain about being bored. For this set, you can hit my subscribe button to

I wouldn’t want to break my own no blogs over 500 words rule, so I better end this part here.
Ready for some more? Check out part 2 (which includes the rest of the week and more great links).
Good luck on your first week of school.