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50 Activities for the First Day of School is a collection of activities teachers can use on the first day of school or anytime they need an icebreaker or team building activity. While aimed at the English language classroom, the book is useful to any teacher. Activities include getting to know you games, creative ways to do needs evaluation, as well as methods of setting your expectations for the class on day one. The first day of school is the most important and the busiest. It's also the hardest because you don't know your students yet. You don't know what they like and what their interests are. Heck, you don't even know their names! And yet, it's your job to walk into a room full of strangers and turn it into a community. You need to set the rules and convey your expectations. You need to find out their needs and expectations. You need to start building a class community. You need to learn their names! With 50 Activities for the First Day of School, you can walk in to any classroom and start off right foot with no preparation. These fun and engaging activities will help you learn students' names, build rapport, assess their knowledge, introduce language, and establish the class rules. Your students will walk away having had a fun first class and you will walk away ready to tackle the rest of the term. All of these activities are all classroom-tested and teacher-approved. And all are presented with clear instructions and ideas to adapt or vary the activities to your students, your teaching style and your classroom.
About the author
As a teacher
I am a teacher and materials writer from Connecticut. I fell in love with teaching English in the Peace Corps in Vanuatu, an island chain in the South Pacific which was the basis for Bali Ha'i in South Pacific. I had the most amazing class of Francophone Melanesian students who were working to complete their high school degrees. They inspired me and led me to love teaching.
Since then I've worked around the world and taught a diverse range of students from Russian oil executives who needed to improve their English for business, to Kazakh scholarship recipients off to study in American universities, to Afghani high school students on the FLEX exchange program and middle-school children taking an extra-curricular speaking class.
As a writer
I began selling lesson plans and activities on my blog in 2007. There appeared to be an actual and growing demand for my work. So I began seeking out some small professional gigs, mostly helping fellow teachers develop lessons for their classes. My school began using me for more and more lesson plan development and editing. After winning a few lesson plan contests, I came to the attention of the Nick Robinson Agency and was very successful there. I continue to work with Nick and ELTJam, as well as independently.
I publish my own books and lesson plans, write for publishers, copy-edit, and design activities and lesson plans for language schools, including online lessons as well as face to face classes. Clients for writing and editing have included Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Pearson, Compass Publishing, 2LTI Testing and New Horizons Language Schools.
Since 2015, I have been part of the leadership team of the Materials Writing Interest Section of the TESOL Association, the international association for English language professionals.
