Your goal [for the first day] is get kids into the classroom, get kids feeling comfortable and safe, and getting kids home safely.
~ Zeba from Episode 95 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
The first day of kindergarten is full of excitement and nerves! Whether it’s your first year or your tenth, there’s always that feeling of not knowing exactly what to expect. In this episode, I’m sharing the three non-negotiables I do every single year (no matter how hectic the summer has been) to feel calm, confident, and ready for day one. Everything else? That’s a bonus. If your classroom isn’t Pinterest-perfect, that’s okay. If you’re still unpacking boxes the first week, that’s okay too. Focus on what really matters and let the rest fall into place over time.
In this episode I share:
- The one thing I always have prepped – even if the classroom isn’t fully set up
- A small but powerful way to make students feel welcome from the moment they walk in
- How I handle family communication before and after the first day (and why over-communicating is actually a good thing!)
Related Episodes:
Related Resources:
- Kindergarten Back to School Activities | First 2 Weeks Kindergarten Lesson Plans
- First Month of Kindergarten Success Kit | Back to School Activities Mega Bundle
First Month of Kindergarten Success Kit
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hey, teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe, and I want to talk about the very first day of kindergarten, but I want to talk about the three things that I did to make sure I was ready for the first day of kindergarten. So let’s get into it.
[0:20] You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress, all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[1:11] The first day of kindergarten is always a very exciting day, but if you are brand new to kindergarten, it is especially full of the feelings. You don’t know what to expect. Even if you are a veteran kindergarten teacher, you don’t really know what to expect of the first day of kindergarten because these kids are brand new to the school. No one really knows them. So there’s just lots of feelings around it. But these are the three things that I make sure I do every year without fail, no matter what’s going on in the summer, no matter if I’m allowed in the classroom until the day before school starts or what. These are my must-do three things before the first day of kindergarten. Everything else is just nice to have or something that’s optional, but these are the must-dos. It’s like what I say to my students, must-dos and can-dos.
[1:58] Okay, so my first must-do before the first day of kindergarten is have my first day lesson plan ready to go and all the materials ready to go. It’s really important to have a clear agenda for the first day of kindergarten to help calm your nerves, set expectations. You want to have lots of activities available, even though you may not use all of them. You want to have some optional activities because things might go quicker than you expect or they may take longer than you expect. It totally depends on the group of students in front of you. And so you want to be flexible with that plan and you want to have some opportunities to add in different activities if needed. You want to make sure that you have in the first day plan how you will teach attention getters.
[2:42] Leave time to teach about rules for recess or taking a quick tour of like where they can find the bathroom and like teaching them the routine of snack or lunch, like whatever you have on that first day, things like that. You really won’t do too much on the first day. Your goal is get kids into the classroom, get kids feeling comfortable and safe and getting kids home safely. That is the main goal for the first day. Everything else is just nice to have. If you want to see my first day plans, I have them for free. They will be in the show notes, so check that out. But also, you can get my whole first two weeks plans, like my exact lesson plans that
[3:22] I use for the first two weeks of school, when you get my back to school kindergarten pack. So that link will be in the show notes as well. definitely encourage you to check that out because I’ve crafted it and loved it and used it every day every beginning of school since starting teaching kindergarten so it definitely works okay my second must do before the first day of kindergarten is making sure I have name tags up to make everyone feel welcome like that is not a choice I want that is important to me that everyone has their name up somewhere in the classroom. It is a really small thing you can do to make kids feel like they belong and they’re welcome for the first day of kindergarten. If you’re doing a visit day or something, you need to have that up before the visit day.
[4:08] And my third must-do that I do before this first day of kindergarten is having some kind of communication with families and have it ready to go. I do a little communication before school and I have something ready to go after the first day.
[4:22] So more communication, the better. More communication in advance, the better. It really helps make the first few days smoother. A lot of these families, if their kids are only children or older children, they are their first child or only child going to school, and they’ve never experienced it before, and they don’t know what to expect. They don’t know how drop-off works, so they don’t know how the bus system works. They don’t know how to order lunch. They don’t know how any of that works. And so the more that you can communicate that with them, the better. And it might feel like over communicating, but actually trust me, that is more, that is preferred because you will get less frantic emails. You will get less emails in general. You will get less parents coming up to you and asking a million questions. The more information you can give, the better.
[5:09] And yes, even if you put it in a letter or I do a little information PowerPoint point with lots of information, you will still have to repeat it, but that’s okay. The more that you can over-communicate, the better that parents and families will feel, and the less that you will have to answer a million and one questions.
[5:29] Before the first day of school, I send home my welcome letter and that information PowerPoint, like I said. On the first day of school, I send home a little letter saying how we had a great day and how to communicate with me. And I send home the ABCs of kindergarten. So there is information for each letter of the alphabet that goes over like all the questions they might have. So they’re getting this information in their email digitally through the slideshow, and they’re getting it through the hard copy paper in the folder with the ABCs in the first day letter. So different ways of communicating is better.
[6:09] So I make sure to have all of that ready to go before the first day of kindergarten. Those are the three must-do things before the first day of kindergarten. If you can, get things ready that involve, like, getting supplies ready and the classroom organized and totally set up. Like, great. That’s amazing. But especially if you’re changing classrooms or teaching a new grade, it’s important to remember you can’t do it all before the beginning of school, and it’s not realistic to expect that, and it’s okay to not have everything ready, and your classroom will continue evolving as the year progresses.
[6:41] So have the sections of your classroom ready that students will be using. If they’re not using it right away, it doesn’t have to be ready to go. It can be closed. I close different sections of my classroom until I’m ready to actually introduce it for my students. If you don’t have all your supplies unpacked, it’s okay. You’ll get to it. Put them in the cabinet. You’ll get to it when you need them. Library a mess and not organized and not sort it into categories, that’s okay. You might not get to it the first year. Maybe you’ll get to it the second year or the third year. One thing I do like to do before the first day of school is get all my folders ready, which in the episode about a couple episodes ago about what to do if you can’t get into your classroom, I talk about getting folders ready for students. I like to do that before school. But the only folder you actually really need for the first day of school is the homeschool folder. You’re not introducing writing folders, science folders, poetry folders, not for a while. So if you don’t have time to get to it, that’s okay.
[7:35] Prioritize name tags. Prioritize having your first day lessons ready to go and the activities ready to go. And prioritize parent communication. After that, anything else you get done is just wonderful and a bonus, right? It might not be perfect. It might not be Pinterest perfect. The classroom might have some blank spaces. And actually, I think they should have blank spaces because you want to leave space for the children to grow with the classroom over time. And you don’t want to overwhelm them with like a lot of decorations and things. So it might look unfinished, but actually there’s purpose behind that.
[8:13] And it’s okay. It’s not, like I said, it’s not going to be Pinterest perfect, but I don’t think it should be because we want to make a classroom that’s ready for the kids, that’s important for their, helpful to their development and making them feel welcome and safe and help them learn, even if it’s not Pinterest perfect, right? And you’ll work on it over the year and you’ll add up their student artwork and their learning and all their things to make it their space.
[8:36] And in our next episode, I’m going to talk about what to actually teach in that first month of kindergarten. But like I said, if you are looking to make your life a lot easier, you can get my exact lesson plans and all the activities I do for the first two weeks of school in my back to school kindergarten pack. But if you want to save more time and be very stress-free for your whole first month of kindergarten, you can get my first month survival kit and it has literally everything that I do with my students in the first month of kindergarten. The whole first month and included in that is the back to school kindergarten pack with the first two weeks lesson plans and all of that. So highly recommend checking that out. Let me know how you feel or feeling about your first day of kindergarten. If you’re excited, if you’re nervous, if you have more questions, reach out. I would love to help you. And I’d love to point you in the direction of more resources that can help you prepare for the first day of kindergarten.
[9:36] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies if you liked this episode the best ways to show your support are to subscribe leave a review or send it to a friend i’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips see you then.