This lesson plan set offers a collaborative, text-based, and student-led approach to teaching and establishing your classroom and school rules in the first week of school. You can use the five rules I use in my classroom and school, or edit to use your own.

Send your students on a scavenger hunt for examples of book characters and their peers exemplifying your classroom and school rules, in collaborative whole group or small groups. Use their findings to create, establish, and then display your classroom and “around the school” rules, giving your students the power, ownership, and motivation needed for your rules and expectations to be effective in helping your classroom run the way you envision.

Finally, a writing prompt helps put it all together for students to share a successful day at school, incorporating your positive behavior expectations into their day.

These lesson plans fit easily into your first week of school activities, get students thinking about successful behavior routines, and help build community through collaboration. The lesson plans also work really well as a follow-up to my Our Hopes and Dreams first day of school activity.