Back to school preparations can feel overwhelming. You need to set up and decorate your classroom. There are trainings to attend. There is a hallway bulletin board to put up and meet the teacher to prepare for. You are excited and nervous all at the same time. Bottom line, it is easy to get so busy you run out of time to plan your first Social Studies lesson of the year.

With so much to manage at the beginning of the year, it makes sense that planning our first Social Studies lesson of the year gets moved to the back burner. But, this first lesson helps set the tone for the year, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. 

Sure, you’ll have to start with procedures, social contracts, and the like, but when it comes time to actually begin your Social Studies teaching, don’t miss the opportunity to start with a memorable lesson.

tips for your first lesson

Here are three key points to keep in mind when deciding on the first Social Studies lesson you teach to your new batch of students:

1 – Keep it easy for students to understand. You don’t want to spend too much time going over directions or modeling what students need to do. Ideally, create a lesson that will be accessible for your students without minimal explanation from you.

2 – Make it memorable. If students remember the lesson, it is an “anchor activity” that you can refer back to again and again. Memorable lessons work for you the day students complete the activity, but also for weeks and months to come. When students remember a lesson, it continues to contribute to their learning even well after it has ended.

3 – Incorporate at least one skill or principle that is important to your students’ success this school year. To determine this, jot down a quick list of what skills you most want students to develop in your class during the upcoming school year. Choose at least one of those skills to play a prominent role in your first lesson. For example, if you want students to be able to effectively work in collaborative groups in your classroom, use collaborative groups for your first Social Studies lesson of the year.

lesson idea

One lesson I love to use at the beginning of the year is an artifact investigation activity. A week or so before the school year starts, I ask several colleagues to please select four objects, or artifacts, that represent who they are. The objects should be fairly small, sturdy, and non-identifying. I then place each colleague’s set of four objects in a large gallon ziploc bag.

Students work in small groups to examine the artifact bags, write down their observations, and make inferences about the person. I like to rotate the bags rather than have the students move, because that simplifies things, but you could have the students rotate.

Once students have made observations and inferences about all the bags (or time runs short), we have a class discussion about how historians use artifacts to learn about the past. We talk about both the benefits and limitations of artifacts. It is a great way to get students thinking about historical thinking right from the get-go. And, as a great extension activity, you can have students write about or bring in artifacts they feel best represent them.

This lesson idea also works for distance learning. To make this activity digital, ask colleagues for pictures of artifacts instead of actual artifacts. You can assemble these on Google Slides or something similar and ask students to type their observations and inferences instead of hand writing them. 

If you want to use this lesson with your students and want to save yourself the time of creating the materials yourself, check out this link to a Investigating Artifacts Activity, already done for you.

Wishing you a great school year! You are amazing and you got this!