Hi Everyone!
Hope you're all doing well!
For some of you, the Back to School rush is almost behind you! Well, for me, it's loooooooming!!! We go back August 25th and the kiddies come in August 31st.
Here are some things I have been doing to prepare!
PLANNING
I love to create and plan fun activities to complete with my students. What I DON'T like is to spend hours filling in a PLANNER with dates, times, subjects,
and then FINALLY what we are going to do for the day.
My friend and colleague Francesca came up with a great alternative and it's a real time saver!
The first thing is to take my schedule and turn all my ELA and MATH subjects into specific lessons. For example, I plug in Writer's Workshop twice a week and complete it without fault on those days every week. This ensures that weeks don't go by without any writing lessons. We get caught up in so many different things that it's easy to drop important tasks to complete others. I do the same for centers, reading response, reading comprehension, math, problem solving, etc...
I like to schedule writer's workshop twice a week as it is such an important lesson. More on how I do writer's workshop in a later post!
I also schedule reading response twice a week as it is an important concept in ELA. I spend one of the lessons modelling and the other the students complete their own reading response. Modelling can be writing a class reading response, editing an existing one to make it better, or using the rubric to decide the grade of a reading response. More on reading response in a later post too!
I slip in guided reading during centers and also when students are working on tasks that don't require much support from me. I squeeze it in whenever and however!
My centers periods are the ones that I can be a little more flexible with. We can sometimes use those periods to complete a craftivity or catch up on unfinished work.
Now for the great idea that Francesca came up with!
She creates pages on the computer with the dates, days, times, and subjects already scheduled in.
This way, all we need to do is write down the book we are using for reading response, or the topic we are writing about, or the problem we will be solving in math.
It's great and makes my life so much easier!
We create the planner for the year, print it, and send it out to be binded.
You can make it as simple or detailed as you wish and tailor it to your needs. You can also add personal touches and make it your own.
I think this year I may add a pop of color! Maybe a cute graphic?!?!
The possibilities are endless!
You can grab a FREE, EDITABLE copy of my planning page and schedule HERE!!!
Until next time...
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