Get Ready for the New School Year

Most people spend their vacation days traveling, relaxing, spending time with friends/family and even indulging in a few libations to get over the stress of day-to-day life. And then there's teachers... It is likely to find a teacher spending the days of their summer vacation scrolling through Pinterest and getting excited for the new school year. Our good time is shopping at the Dollar Tree and Target finding goodies for classroom storage. As much as you may try to NOT think about work, the teacher heart wants what the teacher heart wants. As I was preparing for the upcoming school year, I thought that I'd share a few tips on how I get ready for the first day of school.

First things first, GET A PLANNER! A major part of being a great teacher is staying organized. I find that having all of my responsibilities in one place helps me a great deal with maintaining organization. There are many ways in which teachers pick planners; some use binders to organize with dividers and some use simple monthly planners. This year I decided to create my own teacher planner. I absolutely love how I am able to customize it to meet my needs using the ARC binding system.

Next, you want to start pre-planning. You need two things: your district/network calendar and the scope and sequence for your curriculum. If you don't have them yet, try searching for them on your district/network website. Once you have them you can start filling out your monthly spreads with important dates (I use pen for hard dates like holidays and pencil for dates that are susceptible to change like testing days) and developing a year plan for when you want to teach various domains for the standards. If you really want to make the most of your pre-planning, try making a pacing guide for how many days you plan to allocate towards each skill. There are so many skills that need to be taught in one short school year, developing a pacing guide helps to hold you accountable for teaching all of the standards. I have started my pacing guide by writing down every single skill that needs to be taught and so far I'm at 227 teaching days. Clearly I need to do some fine tuning since there are only 186 days in my school year lol. I will share my math pacing guide as soon as I finish finalizing it.

Once you've finished pre-planning, you want to start thinking about your culture vision. When you think of your ideal class, what do you see? What are students doing? What are you doing? How are students learning? Ask your self all of these questions and write down your thoughts. Now that you know what you want your class to be like, start thinking about what you are going to do when your vision isn't happening. The best teachers establish a system of accountability with consistency. My major goals when thinking about my culture vision are: establishing trust with my students, being fair/consistent and most importantly maximizing learning time. A great book to invest in when thinking about you culture vision is Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire by Rafe Esquith. He has such an eloquent way of establishing trust with his students and his classroom culture is truly inspirational.

Finally, you want to prepare for the new school year by planning  your lessons for the first week of school. I have recently come across the website called Planbook and I am obsessed. I found out about this site from Bridget at The Lettered Classroom on her YouTube channel. She sold me on the benefits of this website and I will definitely be using this site for my lesson plans. Check out her videos here; she has a promo code to get your first 6 months for FREE!

I hope that these tips were helpful and be on the lookout for more information about teacher organization, character development, math, science and more!