Top 5 Back to School Activities for Middle and High School Students

How can you make the first day of school fun for your middle and high school students? How can you prepare yourself for a smooth transition back to school? Do you struggle balancing paperwork with student sessions in the first few weeks of school? We want to make your first days back to school a little less stressful.

Your transition back to school in September can be effortless! Even though you might be bombarded with plenty of paperwork, if you have fun activities all set and planned ahead of time, it’s one less thing to worry about. We want to share with you our top 5 must have resources that we use to start off the school year.

ICE BREAKER ACTIVITIES

Do you have difficulty building rapport with your students? Do you have a group of students who sit at the table in silence? It doesn’t help when they are all glued to their cell phones. We want them to get to know each other on a more personal level and feel comfortable with each other because we don’t want them sitting in silence the rest of the school year. Some of our favorite ice breakers are:

Two Truths and a Lie: Each person writes down two things that are true about themselves and one thing that is a lie. You and your students will share the three items and the other group members will guess which statement is a lie.
Would You Rather…: Provide students with questions to spark discussion, or they can write down their responses to share out. Some of our favorite questions to ask are:
- Would you rather spend a day without your phone or a day with no people at all?
- Would you rather win American Idol or win American Ninja Warrior?
- Would you rather be a Youtube star or an Instagram influencer?
Things in Common: Students find 10 things they have in common by asking each other questions. When all students have something in common, they can add it to their list. For example, some students may all have an iPhone, be in the same grade, enjoy the same sports, take the same classes, eat the same food, etc.

SCAVENGER HUNT: BACKPACK AND CELL PHONE

Have students complete a scavenger hunt by checking off items and earning points as they search their cell phones or backpacks. Navigating cell phones gives you an idea of how familiar students are with features on their phones. Searching backpacks gives you a better understanding of their executive functioning skills by seeing how organized and prepared they are for their classes.

The cell phone scavenger hunt allows students to explore:

School apps
Weather app
Navigation app
YouTube

Some items students will have to search for in their backpack include:

Hand sanitizer
Late pass
Highlighter
White out
Phone charger

WEEKLY RESPONSES NOTEBOOK

Do you have students who finish their work and don’t have anything to do while waiting for the other students to catch up? Or maybe you just need to change it up for your students at that moment? Weekly Responses are the perfect activity to keep your students engaged, while still working on their goals. It is also a great ‘do-now’ activity to get the students started each session. Each month targets a different speech and language skill. Each weekly activity includes a speech and language skills activity and a writing prompt. No matter what time of the year it is, you can teach a quick mini lesson using our skills sheets, and then students can practice the skills. Some targeted skills include: executive function skills, context clues, paraphrasing, note taking, opinion writing, oral language, annotating, citing evidence, figurative language, argumentative writing, and so much more!

NO PREP BEGINNING OF THE YEAR ACTIVITIES

Looking for one resource to start your year off planned and prepared with everything you need? Save yourself time and energy that will set you and your students up for the entire school year. There are 4 versions (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) so you can reuse with your students every year to gather different information from each year they are in speech and language. Writing, reading and vocabulary activities allow you to collect baseline data. Baseline data will help you get a sense on where to start therapy, as well as monitoring progress. Gathering this information in the beginning of the year will make IEP writing a lot easier, especially when you can refer to it so easily. This resource also includes icebreaker activities to help establish rapport, as well as forms, surveys, and inventories to gather specific information about students.

STUDENT ORGANIZATION AND PLANNER

Do you have students who struggle to stay organized and plan out their weeks? So many of our students exhibit executive function (EF) deficits, especially, planning, organizing, prioritizing, and task initiation. This resource will provide you with ways to support your students with organization and planning skills. The Student Organization Planner for Middle and High School comes with different options so you can individualize it for each student. Some students may benefit from simple to-do lists, prioritizing lists, and other organizational tools. Print these sheets as needed or keep copies in your room for students to take as they need. We also provide different versions of daily, weekly, and monthly planning pages; which can be printed as an entire planner and used for the entire year, or a couple of months-the choice is yours. You can print and hole punch the planning pages and add them to a 3-ring binder, have the planner bound at a store like Staples, or you can invest in a binding machine (we use ours a lot) and bind it yourself.