First Day Back with Senior Infants

This day next week will officially be the last day of my summer holidays! I will be spending a few hours between now and then preparing for back to school. I am hoping to get in to school towards the end of this week to set up my classroom, put up fresh backing paper and borders, organise my materials etc. I will have my fortnightly plans done for September, and I hope to have my termly plans done by the end of September. I am really excited to start back with senior infants, it is such a lovely age group to have!

I am going to share here some activities I will be doing with the class for the first two days back.

I will have their names on the desks for when they come in , Education through Creation has lovely ones on her website! So the children will identify where their seats are, and then I will call them to our rug for our first morning meeting. I will introduce myself and we will play a few ice breaker games which I’ll share on my Instagram page if you follow along there!

After this I will encourage the children to engage in free play with the toys provided. While they are playing I will work my way around the room chatting to each child and getting to know them. I think I only have twenty one so it will be quite doable.

We will have small break and then in between breaks we will go through the classroom expectations. I know some teachers are of the opinion that you shouldn’t have class rules anymore but you simply must communicate your expectations clearly to your class or it’ll be an absolute free for all. Children thrive on boundaries, structure and routines being in place. We will spend the time between breaks going through samples of good and bad choices ( I’ll share these on my blog later) and I’ll explain how our days will be structured with the help of our visual timetable. We will talk about kindness , being a good friend and working as a team.

After lunch, we will read ‘Our Class is a Family’ and do an art activity based on this. (I will also share this on my blog later too!)

That will bring us to the end of day one!

Day two we will start off with our morning meeting and we will discuss what we have planned for the day head. We will play more circle time games. After this I will start with revision in phonics.

After break we will play revision maths games, and some Irish games too. Throughout these lessons we will be practicing and reinforcing our routines, how we ask to go to the bathroom, how we line up, how we look after our school supplies etc!

We will read the book ‘A Letter from Your Teacher’ and we will complete an art activity based on this after lunch. We will also work on some cutting activities.

I plan to jump straight in from Monday with our timetable, I feel like the sooner we start the sooner it will all fall into place for them.

Enjoy the last week off everyone!

Valerie