April Fools’ Day, the day of nonsense and vandalism, is a great excuse to take a break from feeling like you have to play ‘straight guy or straight girl’ all the time. For those teachers with sneaky pranks up their sleeves, today can go from being a run-of-the-mill day to one of wit, games, and harmless fun. From fake tests, pranks, and made-up rules, many teachers have used April 1st as an excuse to have some fun bantering with their students!

Your students are likely to try some pranks on you as well. Don’t let them get ahead of you! Here are (some timeless, some new) teacher’s jokes that others before you have used effectively, and we invite you to use them with your own students today:

• Start your class by speaking in another language. Or start the lesson by moving your mouth, but not making a sound.
• Administer a fake quiz or test:

A. Make it very hard and very long, and tell them they have 10 minutes. Stop them after 1, OR
B. Keep it short with several silly or completely incoherent questions.

(End both with “April Fools!”)

• Switch classrooms for the day with another teacher.
• Tell them they have a rehearsal for the next day. Or tell them that you are very disappointed that only a few turned in last week’s essay.
• Make up a word search puzzle without any of the words in it.
• Tell them you’ve created a whole new grading system that consists of animal names or colors (or something weird) instead of letters.
• Pick a student at random and tell them that you will be teaching the class for the entire day. Let them free after a few minutes. If you want, you can continue the prank by going around the classroom and asking them to teach the class.
• Tell them you have brownies for them, and then pass each of them the letter “e” made from brown construction paper. Have the hidden brownies ready.
• Tell them it’s your birthday. Have balloons, cake, the works.
• Rearrange the room. Teach in a different place. Keep moving throughout the day. Or assign new seats to children and then reassign them several times during the day. (Or both.)
• For a whole period, give the wrong answers. You can mix it up by saying one thing and writing something completely different on the board.

Isn’t he a joker? Here are other ideas to celebrate April Fools’ Day:

• Tell several jokes to start the day.
• Play word games.
• Ask them to come up with their idea for the best April Fools’ Day prank and write a story about it.
• Teach your students the history of the day (also called “April Fools’ Day”), its origins, and how it is celebrated in other countries.
• Have a competition to find out who is the funniest student in the class. Have those who would like to compete create a short comedy performance and pick a few judges to rate the skits.
• Have a spelling bee where they have to spell the words backwards.

Many of your children will forget about April Fools’ Day, at least for most of the day, so pranks can end up being very effective. Just make sure you let them know you’re just kidding around! What prank(s) are you planning to do today?