Teaching Your First ELA Lesson of a New School Year

The new school year has started. All of the beginning of the year procedures have been completed. Now it’s time to actually teach a lesson. Feeling a little lost on where to begin?

Here’s what I did every year!

When it comes to beginning the actual teaching part of a new school year, it can be a little overwhelming and difficult to determine where to begin. You have all of these new students who are essentially still strangers at this point and you’re attempting to conduct a lesson while simultaneously trying to monitor their learning and assess everyone’s learning style and habits. It might not sound like it, but that’s a hard thing to do! Everything is just so new, even if you’re a veteran teacher.

I learned to keep the first actual instructional lesson simple.

When I taught 1st and 2nd grade we had a basal series that we taught from. I always waited until after the first full week of school to begin the first story. Not only does this give you the chance to do pretesting and baseline assessments, but you also now have the opportunity to instruct your new kids and see how they acted during actual instruction.

For the first ELA lesson of the new school year, I always liked to focus on character and setting. I’ve found that this is a good baseline when it comes to comprehension. When I first moved to fifth grade, I was coming from first grade and I thought students in this grade level would surely have the concept of character and setting down, so I planned lessons around the 5 story elements and tried to teach character, plot, conflict, theme, and setting all together.

This was a mistake.

Kids need time to adjust to a new school year just like you do! I learned that even if the skill you’re teaching is a little below your students’ instructional level, it’s still a better way to begin the actual instruction part of a new school year. Upper elementary students may have fully mastered a skill, but I think that the point of the first instructional lessons shouldn’t be mastering the content as much as understanding how your students learn and likewise, for the students, how the teacher teaches. If you start out focusing on a complex (or even on grade level) standard, I feel like you aren’t getting an accurate account of your students’ abilities because several different factors could be in play.

For my first ELA lesson, I would introduce character and setting, go over a few examples using mentor texts, and then have my students create their own using this graphic organizer. This was always a super easy lesson that allowed me to observe my students and assess the types of learning styles and learning habits. It allowed me to get an overall better understanding of my new students so I could plan accordingly. We all know how valuable data is, and this type of data comes from a first-hand account of observation and assessment.

You can download a free copy of the character and setting graphic organizer here. If you would like a list of picture books I use to teach character and setting, let me know and I’ll put together a reference guide like I did for plot and summarizing. 🙂