NSW Education Week — Classroom Activities & Open Day Ideas

What NSW Education Week is and why it matters

NSW Public Education Week is the NSW Department of Education's annual celebration of public schools, traditionally held in the first full week of August (typically Term 3 Week 3). It's a chance for schools, families, and the wider community to recognise the work of public educators and showcase student learning. For classroom teachers, the week is part PR, part open day, part celebration — and it lands at a busy point in the term.

If you're a K-6 classroom teacher in a NSW DoE school, Education Week usually means hosting parents and carers for an open morning, putting up a polished classroom display, helping with whole-school assemblies, and squeezing in a showcase lesson that lets visitors see what learning looks like in your room. Done well, it builds parent partnerships, reinforces school pride, and gives students a genuine audience for their work. Done poorly, it eats half a week of teaching time.

This guide pulls together the activities, displays, and routines that experienced NSW primary teachers use to make Education Week meaningful without rewriting their whole program.

Plan your Education Week in three layers

The teachers who get the most out of Education Week think about it in three layers:

1. The classroom showcase — what visitors actually see when they walk into your room
2. The student-led element — how children explain and present their learning
3. The parent take-home — what families leave with so the conversation continues at home

Each layer is small on its own. Stacked together they create a memorable open day without adding hours of planning.

Classroom displays that earn their wall space

Education Week is the right time to refresh your classroom display walls — but resist the urge to print and laminate from scratch. Use what students have already produced. Strong displays for Education Week typically include:

• A "Look what we're learning" board that maps current units to syllabus outcomes in plain language. Parents want to know what their child is doing, not just see pretty work
• A student work showcase that pairs assessment criteria with annotated samples — high, medium, and developing — so families understand the standard
• A process wall showing drafts, edits, and final pieces (especially powerful for writing units)
• A classroom values display or shared norms students helped create
• A photo timeline of the year so far — events, excursions, milestones

For K-2 classrooms, large-print headings, photos of children working, and tactile elements work best. For Years 3-6, more written reflection and self-assessment can be included. See our guide to classroom display ideas for layout principles that work across stages.

Student-led activities for open day

The most powerful Education Week visits are the ones where students do the talking. Some routines that work well:

• Tour stations: Children rotate parents through 4-5 desk stations showcasing different learning areas
• Show-me partners: Each student pairs with their visitor and walks them through one piece of work, using sentence stems like "I'm proud of... because..."
• Mini-lessons: Older students teach a parent something they learned that term — a maths strategy, a writing technique, a science concept
• Question prompts: Pre-prepared questions for parents to ask ("Tell me about a time you got stuck and what you did") to deepen the conversation

Practising these routines for 10-15 minutes the day before makes a huge difference. Without rehearsal, kids freeze.

Activities for the rest of the week

Outside the open morning itself, here are some quick wins for the surrounding days:

• A gratitude letter to a current or former teacher (great writing task, lovely outcome)
• A "day in the life" photo essay students take across a school day
• A public school history mini-investigation for upper primary
• A book swap or maths challenge that families can do together at home
• An acknowledgement of country display refresh, often co-produced with students

These keep momentum across the week without taking over your program.

Reduce the load on yourself

A few practical tips from teachers who've run Education Week many times:

• Do display planning the term before, not the week of
• Ask students to take home one piece per day in the lead-up so the room isn't overwhelming
• Use ready-made printables for invitations, name tags, and place cards rather than designing fresh
• Give yourself one day to reset the room afterwards — don't try to teach a full program on the last day of the week

For the broader yearly view of when Education Week falls alongside other major events, our key education dates 2026 guide lists Education Week alongside the other major calendar markers NSW teachers plan around. And if Education Week is also when your new year-level allocation for next year is confirmed, the back-to-school classroom setup guide will save you Term 4 planning time.