Students taking a variety of different courses need to stay organized to get their assignments in on time. Unfortunately, there is not always an opportunity for learning these skills. Use your homeroom period to teach your students to get organized. Show them how to write due dates down in a planner and how to plan what to work on each evening. Have students check in with you each day on when their assignments are due, and what their work schedules look like. Help them manage their time more efficiently.
Homeroom is also an opportunity for engaging students in larger issues in the world. Use the period to have a discussion each day about something happening in the news. Bring in a different topic each day, ask questions about it and lead a discussion. Alternatively, you can assign a different student to raise a topic in the news each day. Ask that student to bring in his own discussion questions and lead the conversation.
Get students' brains going in the morning by having them write something each day. Assign a different kind of creative writing exercise each morning, such as a haiku about how they feel, a paragraph from the perspective of a teacher or an updated fairy tale. Use every Friday homeroom to read some of the best and most original pieces to the class. Another idea is to have students keep a journal and write in it every morning during homeroom.
A fun way to get the intellectual juices flowing each morning is by offering brain teasers, trivia questions or logic puzzles to students. Put one on the board each morning and let students think about it in groups or alone. If you can't find a good book of brain teasers and riddles, there are plenty of websites with ideas. Put the answer to the previous day's riddle on the board each morning.