Breaking into 2nd Grade

As a first day ice breaker, I highly suggest "Chrysanthemum" by Kevin Henkes. It's a cute story about a young girl starting school and getting picked on for her awesome name. In the end, the character felt good about having a different name, and her peers were actually jealous. After reading the story and talking about the importance of names, my students used oil pastels to draw flowers surrounding their names. Today was only the second day, and I referenced that story at least three times in the past two days. It also gave me the idea to do some friendship building today. I declared today, (the second day of school) "friend day" and my kiddos loved it! I read a great book about how to be a good friend and then we created a poster titled, "tips on how to be a good friend". They were pretty creative with this activity and the poster turned out to be something we can hang in our room all year. Supporting a positive learning environment where the kids work together as teams is something that I strive for in my classroom. These two activities actually helped a bit.