On the first day of AP Language, I want to strike a balance: I want students to sense that this is a challenging class where they’ll do real work, but I don’t want to scare off kids who could benefit from trying, just because it seems above their level. So on day one, we get right into meaningful work.
My main first-day activity is a rhetorical analysis of a cereal box. Students come in, I send them straight to informal groups of four or five with no seating chart yet, and I hand each group an unopened box of cereal, something like Lucky Charms or Fiber One. They make predictions about the box, then open it up and analyze the packaging: the pictures, the messaging, the design choices. They’re actually doing a rhetorical analysis of speaker, purpose, and audience (and later ethos, pathos, and logos), even though we don’t use those terms yet. I’ve written more about how I run this cereal box activity here; it’s one of my most downloaded lessons.
I like starting the year this way because most of the rhetorical analysis students will do outside of school isn’t reading classic speeches, it’s making sense of product packaging, ads, and the constant flood of visual information they take in every day. We do read more traditional texts too, but that’s not the only kind of rhetorical analysis worth teaching.
The cereal box activity takes about 30 minutes. If a group is coming in with a strong pre-AP background, I might add a short writing extension where they write a brief rhetorical analysis of their box. I save syllabus and policy talk for another day; I don’t want to open the year with the driest, most forgettable part of class when everyone else is doing that too.
I also skip the traditional icebreaker, two truths and a lie, “tell us a fun fact,” that kind of thing. I’ve mostly taught in small schools where students already know each other, and a lot of the students in this class are introverts who don’t love that format anyway. If you do want a more structured icebreaker, I use a different one that gets students up and moving, finding things in common with a group before presenting it to the class.
Ultimately, the first day is about setting a tone, for the class and for yourself as a teacher. I want students to see that we do meaningful work, and I want to show up as myself so they know what they’re signing up for.