45 First Day of School Messages

What the child actually needs to know

Almost every first day message is written by an adult who is more emotional about the day than the child is, and that mismatch is the whole problem. You are at the kitchen counter thinking about how small they were four years ago. They are thinking about whether the toilets are near the classroom and whether anybody will sit next to them at lunch. A four year old does not need telling that this is a milestone. They need to know who is collecting them, what happens if they need a wee, and that the sandwich in the bag is the cheese one and not the ham one they hate.

So the message that earns its place is concrete and forward facing rather than commemorative. Name the teacher. Name the pick up spot and the time. Name the thing in the lunchbox. Then say plainly that it is allowed to be rubbish on day one, because a lot of children spend the first week convinced that everybody else has settled and they are the only one who has not. These lines work either side of the Atlantic. Swap reception for kindergarten and Year 7 for sixth grade and nothing else needs touching.

Nursery and reception, ages four and five

Keep it to facts a small person can hold in their head while standing in a queue. One adult, one place, one time, one food. Anything longer than about three lines gets lost somewhere between the coat peg and the carpet, and a child who cannot yet read will have this read aloud to them by somebody in a hurry.

• Mrs Oduya is the one with the red lanyard. She already knows your name.
• Lunch comes after the big playtime, not before. Your sandwich is cheese, no crusts, in the blue box.
• If you need the toilet you just ask. You do not have to put your hand up and wait.
• I will be at the gate by the bike rack when the bell goes. Same gate as this morning.
• You do not have to make a friend today.

Notes that go in the lunchbox or the pocket

This one has different rules from all the others, because the note gets read without you there. It might be opened by a child who cannot read well yet, or by one who is already close to crying and is now trying to decode your handwriting with a room watching. So it has to survive being read alone. Capitals if they are little. Six or seven words a line. No jokes that need an audience, no in-references that only work if you are sitting next to them, nothing that needs a second sentence to make sense of the first. If they are pre reading, draw it: a stick figure at a gate, a clock face with the hands at home time.

• Home time is quarter past three. Me, at the gate.
• Cheese. No crusts. Apple is in the side bit.
• If today is horrible you can tell me all of it in the car.
• Nain is picking you up today. She has the blue car.
• You are allowed to be quiet today.
• Back garden after school. Both of us. No homework.

Primary and elementary school

By this point the building is not the unknown any more, the people are. New teacher, new table, and a real chance that the friend they lived beside all summer has been put in the other class. Address the specific change rather than the general occasion.

• New teacher, same school, same friends, same peg by the window. Only one of those has changed.
• If you end up on a different table from Nadia, that is not the end of it. Playtime still exists.
• You are allowed to say you do not understand. That is more or less what a teacher is for.
• I have signed the reading record for the whole week already. That bit is not your problem.

Moving up to middle school or secondary

Ask a ten year old what they are actually worried about and you get a corridor, a locker, a timetable printed with room codes, and a lunch hall containing fifteen year olds. Growing up does not come into it. Answer the corridor and the rest goes quiet on its own.

• Everybody else is also pretending they know where the science block is.
• You will get lost. That is what the first fortnight is for. Ask a teacher, not a Year 9.
• Your bag is heavy because of the water bottle. Take the water bottle anyway.
• If lunch is confusing today, just eat something and sit somewhere. You can work out where you actually want to sit by Thursday.

Starting high school

Fourteen year olds read tone before content, and anything that sounds like a speech gets filed as a speech. Short, unsentimental, and no questions that need answering in front of anyone.

• Nobody is going to ask what you want to be. Not today, not for years.
• You do not have to keep the friends you had in August. You also do not have to drop them.
• Text me if you want. I will answer and I will not ask forty questions back.

A new school in the middle of the year, knowing nobody

Do I have to talk to anyone at lunch? That was the only question my friend's son Wilf asked in the fortnight before he started at a new school in February, and his mum kept answering a different question, the one about how well he would settle in by summer. He did not care about summer. He cared about a forty minute window on a Tuesday.

This is the hardest version of the day and it deserves the most honest message. A child joining in September walks into a room where nobody has a seat yet. A child joining in February walks into a room where everybody has a seat, a lunch group, a running joke from October that they will never fully get, and a project partner already chosen. Telling that child it will be fine by Friday is a lie they can check. They will check it on Friday.

So do three things. Say out loud that the first fortnight will be strange, and put a number on it so it has an end. Give them one small job that is achievable on day one and does not depend on anybody else being kind, which usually means finding a single person who is also standing on their own rather than trying to join a group. And if the move was your decision, and it usually was, say so. A child who is angry about a move and has nowhere to put the anger will put it into the mornings instead.

The other thing worth saying, which parents skip because it feels like inviting failure: tell them what happens if the day goes badly. Phone on loud, you will answer, they can ring at lunch, nothing they say will get anybody in trouble. Most of them never ring. Having the option is the part that works.

• It will be strange for about two weeks and then it will be less strange. I am not going to pretend it will be fine by Friday.
• You do not owe anyone the story of why you moved. Your name and where you came from is plenty.
• Find one person who is also on their own at break.
• If you sit in the wrong place at lunch you can move tomorrow. Nobody keeps a record of it.
• I know you did not choose this. I did. I am sorry it landed on you and I am not going to pretend otherwise just to get a calm morning out of you.
• Ring me at lunch if you want to. My phone is on loud all week.

For an anxious child, or one who was bullied last year

The message here is not encouragement, it is information. Anxiety runs on unknowns, so every unknown you can close is worth more than any amount of reassurance. And if last year went badly, the single most useful line is the one that tells them an adult already knows, so they do not have to open the day by explaining themselves from scratch.

• Last year is not coming with you. Different room, different register, different children.
• If it goes wrong today you tell me and we deal with it together. You are not sorting it out on your own again.
• Mrs Oduya knows. I spoke to her on Thursday. You do not have to start that conversation.
• You can have a bad first day and a good second day. Those are separate days.

For a child with additional needs

Write the plan down and let the note be the plan. Which adult, which room, which object in which pocket of the bag. Anything vague is worse than nothing here, because a vague instruction has to be interpreted in the middle of a loud corridor.

• Mrs Kaur is the one you go to. Blue lanyard, and she knows about the ear defenders.
• If the hall is too loud you can eat in Room 4. That is already agreed. You do not have to ask twice.
• Your card is in the front pocket of your bag. Show it to any adult and they will help.

Going back after a hard year

Illness, a death in the family, a long absence, a year that everybody in the house would rather not discuss on the doorstep. The child is walking back into a building full of people who may or may not know, and who may or may not say something. Give them a sentence they can use.

• You are going back into the same building and you are not the same person. Both of those are allowed.
• If somebody asks about it and you would rather not answer, you can say you would rather not. That is a whole sentence and it is finished.

When the day is harder for you than for them

I remember standing at the reception gate that first morning, doing the cheerful voice, and then walking back to the car and sitting in it for about eleven minutes before I could drive anywhere. Cadi had gone in without looking back, which I had specifically hoped for and then quietly resented. None of that belongs in the note. Your feeling about the size of their shoes is real and it is yours to carry, and a child who finds it in a lunchbox will spend the afternoon managing your emotions on a day when they already have plenty to manage.

Put it somewhere else. Text a friend, ring your own mother, write it in the back of a notebook where nobody will read it. Then write the child four lines about the red lanyard and the bike rack.

The part I cannot square

Everything above argues for restraint. Facts, logistics, no ceremony, no big feelings handed to a small person to hold. And yet the notes children actually keep, the ones that turn up twenty years later folded into a passport or taped inside a wardrobe door, are almost never the ones about the pick up time. Cadi still has the card her nain Delyth sent for the first day of reception, and it contains no useful information whatsoever. It says Delyth is proud of her, that she thought about her all morning, and that there is a bag of sweets waiting at hers on Sunday. It has been taped inside a wardrobe door for years now, in a bedroom she has nearly outgrown.

I am not going to reconcile those two things into a tidy rule, because I do not think they reconcile. The practical note is the one that helps on the day. The sentimental one is the one that survives. Both kinds are in the lists on this page, and there is nothing stopping you sending one of each, in different pockets.

From a grandparent

Grandparents get the sentimental licence that parents mostly should not use, partly because they are not the ones doing the morning. Use it. And post it so it arrives on the Wednesday rather than the Monday, when the first day is over and nobody has asked how it went for two days.

• Your mum cried on her first day and was completely fine by lunchtime. I have the photograph to prove it.
• I am not there today but I will ring on Saturday, and you can tell me the whole thing from the beginning.
• I started at my school sixty years ago this month, in a building that is a car park now. Have a good one.

From a teacher welcoming a class

A teacher writing to thirty children has the opposite constraint from a parent writing to one. You cannot be specific about the individual yet, so be specific about the room. Where the pegs are, what happens at half past ten, what you do about names. Children arriving into an unknown room will read a description of that room more carefully than any welcome.

• I already know all twenty nine of your names and I will still get two of them wrong this week. Correct me every time.
• Your peg is by the window and your tray has your name on it. Coats on the hook, bags underneath.
• You do not have to be good at everything in this room. You have to have a go, and put your hand up when you are stuck.

From an older brother or sister

Younger siblings believe a Year 8 over a parent on almost any school question, which makes an older sibling note disproportionately powerful and usually about three words long. Let them write it themselves and do not edit it.

• The dinner ladies give you extra if you say please. That is genuinely the only secret I have.
• If somebody is horrible to you, tell me before you tell Mum. I am in Year 8 and I am closer.

Turn it into a group card

A first day is one of those occasions where a lot of people have something to say and no sensible way to say it. A teacher welcoming a new class. A family spread over three counties who all want the child to know somebody was thinking about Monday morning. A swimming club or a scout group sending a kid off to a school none of them will be at. One card that everybody signs solves the coordination problem that a pile of separate texts does not.

A group card online with multiple signatures fits this well, because each person writes their own line in their own words and nobody has to walk a physical card around a classroom during registration. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, add a photo of the school gate or the ludicrously oversized new blazer, and schedule when it lands. If you are a teacher building one for a class, the instinct that makes a good end of year message works at the start of the year too, which is the argument in graduation messages from a teacher. If a head is retiring the same term your child starts, retirement wishes for a principal covers that card. And keep good luck messages for exams for a few years from now, because the rule does not change: name the actual thing, not the feeling about it.

Set the delivery for seven in the morning, before the shoes go on and the hunt for the book bag starts. Not the night before, when it turns into one more thing to lie awake about.