Activities to engage students for back to school

Let’s take a look at some activities that will help set you and your students up for a productive start to the school year.

When school is set to begin and you need to catch the kids’ attention, your best bet to engage your students is classroom activities to build your classroom community.

Encourage your students to build their relationships with collaborative activities, support their social emotional learning and establish class expectations so everyone is on the same page.

Who said graphs can’t be fun? Probably your students and probably more than once. Well, this task may change that. Using Canva’s Graph Maker, making graphs is fun and engaging.

Why not ask your students to graph how they spent their break? Or show how many books they read and how many movies they watched? Perhaps they could also list their favorite comics, songs, games or TV-shows, and bond over common interests. This activity leverages the excitement of the break.

Infographics are an incredible communication tool that have a huge scope of use. You’ll see infographics used in media, marketing, reports and all over social media too. It’s a clever way to make statistics engaging and easier to understand. That’s why they’re so great for distilling complex ideas down to an easy-to-understand explanation – and doesn’t that sound like a great challenge for your students.

Using Canva’s infographic templates, it’s easy for your students to get started. Start by gathering some data about everyone’s time off. For example, what did people get up to in their time off? How many people saw a movie? How many people had a birthday?

Then, scaffold your lesson to show creative ways to present some of this data. You can help them start inspired by searching ‘Infographics’ in Canva and they’ll see thousands of templates to give them ideas and a starting point. Or check out this video for some more ideas.

One of the best parts of going on a trip is getting a little memento of your time there. With Canva, you can make customizable certificates to welcome your students back to school. You can create certificates for anything and everything, and they’re a great way to celebrate your students’ return from the break.

Or you could ask students what skills they want to develop this year, and provide them with a list of ideas so they’re not stuck. Set the goals together and give out future-oriented certificates, or just gather information on what’s important to them so you’re empowered to help them celebrate down the line.

Canva for Education makes it easy to inspire your students and make their return back to school easier and more enjoyable. Use Canva to keep your students actively engaged as they learn and start the year with some momentum.

Did you know Canva for Education is free for teachers and schools? Head here to learn more and sign up!