Heidi Siwak and I were chatting, and she pointed out that, quite often, beginning teachers don’t know what the first day of school looks like. When I did my teaching degree, we talked about the rituals teachers use on the first day of school, but never got to see them actually practices. By the time we observed any classrooms, the rituals and procedures of the classroom had been firmly established.

I suggested that we should all share what do on the first day of school and then provide these resources to new teachers. There are a number of ways we can share these ideas.

  • We can blog about how we start school on the first day.
  • We can video tape ourselves during our first day (please edit it down to 5 minutes) and share it.
  • You can just list ideas of how to start the first day of school on Twitter.
  • You can share your ideas in any other ways you want.

To share links to these first day of school resources on Twitter, Heidi has suggested we use the hashtag #newteacher1styear. I’d also recommend cross-posting your resources to #ntchat and #edchat.

Update: In discussion on Twitter, Jana Scott Linday thought of expanding this project to the first year. Lisa Dabbs is setting up has set up a YouTube account to host the videos, and we will be continuing discussions on how we can share ideas for the first year of teaching.

If someone has already started a similar project, please let me know…