"I had a happy first day!" Headbands

 

 I have had a lot of success with these headbands in my pre-kindergarten class.  It is a great first day of school project because it is easy and the children always enjoy putting the smile stickers on! I make the headbands ahead of time (including writing their name in tiny letters...although I do encourage them to try to write the name themselves if they can) and then the children can color the headbands and add as many smiley face stickers as they would like.

I used free printable clip art for the smiley faces and copy it on yellow construction paper or cardstock.  You could also print up the happy faces right from the computer.  With the children so fascinated by emojis, it might be fun to print those up and let them choose. On a sentence strip, I wrote the words "I had a happy 1st day in VPK! (The voluntary pre-k program that I teach in my state)

Of course, not every child is happy at school on the first day, but I do have this written for each child.  If a child is sad, we talk with them about SOMETHING that was happy about their day.  Sometimes it is as simple as the snack that they had, but we can usually find a reason for them to smile.