Simple Open House Activities
Anyone with me when I say… this night stresses me out? Having something for the parents to do while they wait for everyone to show up sure helped me relieve some of the anxiety. Here’s some simple open house activities that you can do if you are like me!
Estimation Station
Here’s one simple open house activity: Have an area in your classroom with some type of jar with items in it. We always did either centimeter blocks or math manipulative shapes. I put the jar out, then I had sticky notes and pens. Parents guess how many items were in the jar. They would write their child’s name on the sticky note and their estimation. The next day we would count the items and let the parents know who won. It’s fun and easy, and the students love it.
graphing experiment – Simple Open House Activities
Oh… this one is a TON of fun! The day of Open House, I always have the students complete a picture graph of WHO CLEANS YOUR ROOM. The students DO NOT know that I’m going to show their parents the answers at open house. Oh Oh! At open house, I have the blank graph with a picture of each student. Parents drag their child’s name to the correct answer. Once I’m done with Open House, I go to the graph that the students completed. We ALL get a good laugh out of this one!
Guess who, Here’s a clue
For this activity, this is the first flip book my students worked on in first grade. There are four pages of clues. Parents walk around the classroom looking at the picture and clues to guess which flip book belongs to their child. Lots of laughs for this one, for sure. This truly helps with the temperament of the room. Some parents are just as stressed as you are, so it really helps for them to see that not only are you going to teach, but you’re going to have fun with their child as well. And I just have to say, not many parents guess correctly! It’s sort of funny! Check out the video below to see it in action. Want to see it in my TpT Store, click here.
Write a note to your child
Another simple open house activity I have is a cute little paper for parents to write a note to their child. They usually tell them how excited they are for them to be in first grade and that they can tell they are going to learn tons. I read the note to the students the next morning. **If a parent didn’t show up, I always write the note myself OR I ask their kindergarten teacher to write it – depending. If you want to grab that note, see below.
Large construction paper
For YEARS we had a school supply store 5 minutes from my house (insert happy dance). I spent many many summer days and evenings perusing all of the things! But then they closed. Whomp Whomp! One of the things I missed the most was the large construction paper bundles that they had for under $5.00. The colors were sooooo vibrant and didn’t fade. I finally found the same ones on Amazon recently. Click on the picture to the left for my affiliate link. If you search colors, you can find tons. I never did the assorted because I like for everything to be uniform, but I surely had over 30 packs at any given time so that I had an assortment of colors to pick from.
Click here for the affiliate link.
LET ME KNOW…
I’d love to hear from you. Did this help? Are you using the letter template? Did you decide to do the open house activity? Did you do other things that might help new teachers? Please leave feedback in the comments if you’d like to share.
Sincerely,
Shanon Juneau
We Are Better Together
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