Students build a strong beginning-of-year classroom community by exploring the question, “What can we do to help our new class feel like a team?” Through partner greetings, circle-time role-play, shared writing, and movement, they practice sharing, helping, asking kindly, listening, including others, and solving small problems together. Across the week, they create a class pledge poster and welcome display that teach others how to build teamwork, ending with a Kindness Parade and class reflection that help students see how their actions support belonging.

Students will practice collaborative conversations by greeting others, taking turns, listening closely, and sharing ideas in pairs, small groups, and whole-class circles. They will learn and use simple teamwork words and actions—such as sharing, helping, asking kindly, and solving small problems together—to build a classroom team and show care for others. Students will communicate feelings and teamwork through movement, gestures, and role-play, then contribute to shared class products by creating welcome cards, class pledge ideas, and visual reflections on how their actions helped the group.

Students will create welcome cards, picture labels, and practice movement poses that show ways classmates can share, help, ask kindly, and solve small problems together. As the project develops, they will also co-create a class pledge poster with handprints, drawings, and student-dictated sentences about how they will listen, include, and care for one another. By the end, the class will produce a hallway display that teaches other classes how to help a new class feel like a team and use these materials during the Kindness Parade with signs, gestures, and short role-play scenes.

Begin with a Welcome Walkabout where students move in partner pairs around the classroom, practice greeting classmates with hand signals and kind words, and notice places where teamwork happens. In a whole-group meeting, ask, “What can we do to help our new class feel like a team?” and have students sort picture cards showing actions such as sharing, helping, asking kindly, and solving small problems together. Invite the school counselor to join the launch for a short circle-time game using movement and simple role-play so students practice greeting, listening, and sharing feelings. Close by creating a class anchor chart of “team actions” that students will use to guide their welcome cards, movement poses, and class pledge.

Host a Kindness Parade where students carry their welcome cards, demonstrate their teamwork movement poses, and perform short role-play scenes about greeting others, listening, including classmates, and solving small problems together. Invite another first grade class, school staff, and the counselor to watch in the classroom and hallway, then stop at the hallway display and class pledge poster so students can share one line about how they helped the class feel like a team. End with a brief class circle where students greet the audience, act out one teamwork moment, and reflect on their learning by adding a sticky note or drawn face to the teamwork chart.