5 Tips For An Amazing Back To School Night
So, you want to host a successful Back To School Night? Of course you do! Back To School Night (or Meet The Teacher, Open House, etc.) is an important night for many reasons. You meet your students and their caretakers for the first time. This is the first time they will enter your classroom and get a feel for their school year and of you. They are learning to get comfortable in their new learning space. I’m going to share some tips to make your Back To School Night amazing!
Display Directional Signs
You will be very busy on Back To School Night. Families will talk to you, some more than others. You may get “stuck” talking to someone for a long period of time and you don’t want to leave families just standing around not really sure what to do, especially if they have other classrooms to go to. When you put out directional signs, that helps families get started with what they need to do.
Keep All Handouts In A Freezer Bag
You probably have a lot of handouts and forms to pass out to families. To make it easier, put all paperwork inside a freezer-sized bag. Write each students name on the bag and place it on their desk. That way, if one gets left behind, you know whose bag it is and can send it home on the first day of school. By keeping all the paperwork in the bag, papers won’t get lost and sometimes, families send all of it back in the bag which makes it easier on you to organize!
Have Something For Siblings
This is important, especially for younger siblings who see all the new things in your classroom and just want to play! Put out some tubs of math manipulatives for them to play with while their family does what they need to do during Back To School Night.
Create A Student Station
You can make a fun student station for your new students to do while their caretakers are talking to you. This is a special station just for them to do something, while the rest of Back To School Night is done with their parents.
One idea is a bookmark station. Students can create, decorate, and color a new bookmark that they either use at school or at home. In this resource, you can type in your class list and the names will automatically appear on the bookmarks! Easy peasy! If you don’t want to do a student station, you can still make these bookmarks and send them home with students.
Another idea is to make an estimation station. Students estimate how many erasers/jellybeans/m&ms/whatever are in a jar. Then, on the first day of school you can tell them who was the closest and give each student one of whatever was in the jar.
Have Caretakers Put Away Supplies
This one was a game changer for me. It’s such a time saver for you. I remember my first back to school night, I had parents put everything on their child’s desk. I had no plan. It was terrible. Now, I have caretakers put supplies in labeled bins. I place the labeled bins on my kidney table and on the floor next to it and then they can put the supplies away. Then, I can just put the bins into my supply closet and we are all done!
Check It Out!
If you’re thinking, “Oh I need this!”, don’t worry! You can grab everything I talked about in this blog post here.
Virtual Back To School Night?
Hosting a virtual Back To School Night this year? No problem! You can read about that here.
Download A Free Welcome Sign
Here’s a bonus tip for you: Put a welcome sign of some sort on your smart board. I used to put all my directions up there before I started using directional signs, as you can see in the photo above. So, if you don’t want to print the signs and put them around, that works too! Now, I like to put up a welcome sign. You can download it here. It will open in Google Slides, so you must have a Google account to access it.
