Back to School Teaching Resources

Make 2023 your best year yet with back-to-school teaching resources created by primary teachers, for primary teachers! The teachers of Teach Starter have created a curated collection of back-to-school activities, printable worksheets and decorations, and more to help you get classroom-ready before the big day!

Back-to-School Activities

During the first week of a new academic year connection is more important than content. With that in mind, we've found that the best back-to-school activities have a focus on building relationships in the classroom.

The trick is to develop connectedness by focusing on four main areas:

• relationships
• belonging
• inclusion
• active participation

Some ideas you might want to add to your list:

1. Tell your students a little bit about you — What could be more surprising than finding out your teacher has a life outside school? A great way to make a connection with your new students is to share a little bit about yourself. Perhaps you could tell your students about your family, your interests and why you love being a teacher. Make your life easier by using our PowerPoint Templates to create and share a slideshow all about you as part of your back-to-school activities.
2. Play icebreaker games — After they get to know you, make sure classmates get to know one other! These Icebreaker Game Cards include a set of 20 icebreaker games to help your students get to know each other. We particularly love The Spider's Web Icebreaker as a back-to-school activity as it encourages students to reflect on how we are different and how we are connected.
3. Create a classroom contract — Make sure that you spend time establishing clear expectations with your students. A great way to do that is to create a classroom contract with students involved.
4. Play team-building games — Playing team-building back-to-school games encourages students to learn the life skills of compromise and collaboration. So, be sure to include a few team-building games the first week of the school year. To get things off to a good start, display our Teamwork Poster in your classroom.

Back to School 2023

We know teachers from Victoria to New South Wales to Queensland will be heading back into the classroom in 2023 ready to decorate and organise their classrooms, and our teacher team has reviewed every printable and digital resource for starting school to help you prep for the start of the term. Save time on your classroom set-up and first-day-of-school planning with resources that have already been planned out by expert teachers!

Explore this collection to find:

1. Fresh ways to welcome students to a new classroom
2. Ideas to encourage your new students to get to know each other
3. New activities to warm up young minds after a long holiday
4. Resources for setting expectations and reinforcing routines
5. Back-to-school checklists to keep you organised
6. And so much more!

The collection also contains carefully selected teaching resources from across the curriculum that will inspire your teaching for the first days and weeks of the 2023 school year and beyond.

Welcome back to school! It's going to be a wonderful year!