Move Up Day is a great idea for building excitement and creating a culture that embraces wonder. I’ve done Move Up Day quite a few times and each time, I find that I wish I had more time to spend with the students who come to visit me.
The concept behind ‘Move Up Day’ is simple. Each grade level gets to ‘Move Up’ to the next level. We usually do this school wide, on a day when our fifth graders are doing some part of their end of the year celebration.
Kindergarten moves up to first.
First moves up to second .
Second moves up to third and so on.
The whole idea behind Move Up Day is to provide students with an experience in their next grade level.
Teachers are free to do whatever they think might be fun or welcoming. I’ve done it several times and I do something different each time! It’s tons of fun!
All the times I’ve done this, I was in first grade and I got the biggest kick out of getting to meet the incoming Kinders! What I MOST wanted students to know is that in first grade we have tons of fun while we read, write and learn together. I almost always read a book first.
My favorite book to read for Move Up Day is ‘First Grade, Here I Come’. It’s a sweet little story and doesn’t take long for me to read and get students to connect to. It is fun to compare what the kids have experienced in kinder to what we do in first grade. They come to find out that there are many things that are the same! It’s so much less frightening for many of the kids to understand that.
One idea that I’ve enjoyed using is the illustrated survey. I talk to the kids about what we learn in first grade and I let them tell me how they feel about that. On year’s where we’ve had more time, I can turn their answers into a scattergram. (Just a visual graph where students line up to show their responses). It’s always neat for them to see how many students have the same feelings about moving on to the next grade level.
My last year in first, we made a hat to show the words we’d learn in first grade. That was SO COOL! ๐ It’s probably my favorite thing I did for Move Up Day. I had the pieces all set up when the kids came in. They got to color the pictures and then we talked about the meaning of each picture and the patterns present in each of the words. We were super cute, y’all!
There are tons of other ideas in the resource I created. All could work in any K-2 classroom. Just mix and match like I did, or pick one idea and run with it! These are also great back to school ideas too! ๐ Great first and second day things to do that are fun and easy!
If you are looking for these ideas and more, click HERE.
