Week one in school

First week is always hard, especially for the new teachers. This year is my first year teaching overseas, and my first year teaching high school kids. I had no idea about who they are, how their Chinese is, the first week is for them to decide whether they like you or not.
It was tough, I did a lot of research online, but how to emerge other teachers' experience into my classroom, there is no right answer.
I did a PowerPoint about myself, showed some of my pictures, and had a short story about myself on the first day; I think it's a good way to introduce you as a new teacher.
From the second day on, I started this newspaper project with my students. I don't know the person, who originally came up with this idea, but this is an awesome project, my husband uses it for his Grade2 kids every year. But it's also good for language classes.
The newspaper includes five different parts:
The inside scoop: some basic information about yourself, like name, age, likes and dislikes, etc,
My exclusive story: I gave students some topics to choose from, like their birthday parties, travel stories, experience of going to see a doctor, I chose from the lesson they have studied last year,
Meet my hero: describe a person they like and admire, most of them chose their dad or mom.
An awesome ad for a movie & a book review: this is simple, just write one or two short sentences about the book and movie they like.
It is a big project for them in the first week back to school, they think it's too hard at the beginning. I divided the whole assignment into four days. Pre-work is really important, give the examples, ideas and your expection clearly, check their work and provide your help while they are doing it. They were proud to show me their work at the end of the week. I was proud of them too. My kids put their work on the wall after I marked them. They looked awesome.

But this is not the only reason I'm doing it. You learned a lot about your students, their family and their personality. You should be able to tell which level they are at by this stage as well. I changed my original plan and decided to review last year's book with my Mandarin 2 class after this, my kids are happy with this decision.