The first few weeks of a new school can be overwhelming for even the most experienced teachers. When you're just starting out, the barrage of questions you need to answer can be paralysing: Where do I start? How do I set up my classroom for success? What do I do in Week One? 

We consulted with a team of experienced educators to round up the resources that will show you what you can do in the first weeks of school to hit the ground running, move immediately towards achieving curriculum outcomes, and feel confident in this new environment.

1: Pick up and teach this curriculum unit based on a quality children's literary text - designed especially for the first week of school! 

Begin the school year with creative, adaptable, curriculum-linked activities for all year groups. Check your school's library for Don’t Forget by Jane Godwin and Anna Walker.

It's an ideal text for all primary school age groups to study in the first few weeks of the school year to support the building of a positive classroom community. As well as being a springboard for a teaching a variety of reading skills, the book provides prompts that can be used to help students find ways to express what is important to them and their lives. If you use one resource on this list, make it this one - it will guide you right through Week One.

2: Watch a video that explains how you can best plan and program weekly English and literacy lessons! 

Associate Professor Kaye Lowe from the University of Canberra is a literacy learning expert. In this video, recorded on-demand and designed especially for beginning teachers, she shares top tips that are highly practical and relevant for the first week of school. Most importantly, she explains best practice ways to organise the English and literacy block - that is, the weekly lessons required to teach to meet English and literacy outcomes for each year group.

To help bolster your learning, the video comes with downloadable slides containing all of Kaye's top tips - as well as a list of rich texts, compiled by Kaye, that would make positive additions to your classroom library.

3: See examples of classroom set-ups that really work so you can create the best possible learning environment for students

Your classroom, its resources and the print around its walls will all impact on your students' success. That's why we've pulled out a chapter from the brilliant new-teacher text Where do I start? Stimulating ideas for literacy-rich primary classrooms by Robyn Wild to share with you all. 

This chapter contains photographs of Australian classrooms that represent the possibilities of best-practice classroom setup, design and organisation. It considers how to arrange the classroom for both students and teachers, from desk setup to classroom libraries and beyond. It also lists equipment that supports literacy development!

4: Level up your lower primary morning circle and solidify routines with these tried-and-tested songs, chants and movement games

You can reinforce good speaking and listening habits in a morning circle- and we're here to help.

Try this musical name game where students can learn about their peers (or this one, where students can share about their families) - and you can build a happy class. 'Gotta get up', another morning greeing song, is accompanied by certain movements and is designed to help strengthen verbal memory and the storage of phonological information in the temporal region of the brain. Plus, they're all linked to specific curriculum outcomes, including: AC9EFLE01, AC9EFLA02 and AC9EFLA08. If you want more activities like this, they're all from the brilliant teacher text The early reading and music partnership, by Lorri Bevridge. 

5: Take a look at these tips for building teacher confidence and wellbeing.

Robyn Wild - who we mentioned above - has, in her considerable time as a literacy expert and educator, reflected often on what it takes to develop into a teacher who is self-motivated, reflective and aware. We've rounded up her top tips for getting there in the blog post linked above.

You might also like to read these 7 health and wellbeing tips from fellow educators - tried and tested!