It's 8:30 am and I am getting ready to write my weekly lesson plans. It's always so hard for me to get started but once I get into it, I'm so glad I'm almost done! What weekly weekend work do you bring home that needs to get done even though you drag your feet to begin?
At this point in my career, the lesson planning takes very little time. Weekends are for getting my house back in shape. A typical Saturday would involve mountains of laundry and some food shopping.
I with you---I put off those lesson plans till the last minute. I've got my cart right here beside me and that is what I am supposed to be working on now, but look where I am.
Zoe, Your county should have a mandated lesson plan form (ours does but only our school and one other one out of the 13 in the county actually use it - not user friendly) takes 15 minutes at most since you can't put any information in it hardly except standard, elements, and page numbers. Ours are due on Fridays before we go home. I managed yesterday during a 1/2 day of teacher work day (we spent the other 1/2 day in unnecessary meetings) to: finish report cards, do my lesson plans, do my differentiated instruction sheet (another unnecessary form), clean my desk off and my small group table, and do my "shut down" list (we are on fall break this coming week), planned out centers for the next units in math and reading, and met with the attendance clerk so that my report cards and their report matched. I can now enjoy my vacation and not have to worry about "school related" things.
I do my plans during my plan periods (imagine that). I have one very light day, Tues., and I try to get most of them done that day. I get any copies made on Friday afternoon if I haven't already.
Grading! I'm behind two weeks, but I vow to catch up tomorrow. It's just such a pain! I don't take grades on much, but I do like to put checks and stickers on everything so parents know that I looked at the stuff.
I have some things I set up each day and that takes some time. My kids have some very individualized math activities, so I do those either before school, after school or ON THE WEEKENDS! I am going to go in today and do some work! I make my plans each morning, based on what we did the day before. I make monthly goals and really try to get to each of them!
Kind of a hijack here, but I always find the differences between states interesting. Here in Illinois, the districts are not broken up by counties. Could you imagine a huge county like mine -Cook County, which includes the entire city of Chicago- being one school district? In Illinois, we do not have statewide standardized forms for things like curriculum planning or lesson plans. My school district doesn't even have a standard form, and we are a small K-8 district with four schools. Our school doesn't even have a standard form; we all do our own thing when it comes to how we plan, and we don't have to turn the plans in. Now to answer Zoe's question - I bring home anything I didn't get graded during the week. I usually put it off to do while I watch TV on Sunday night. The rest of the weekend is spent grocery shopping, cleaning, going to soccer games, and playing with my kids.
Grading, graphing, revising programs, analyzing behavioral data, and lesson planning. Only sometimes, I bring it home, let it sit around my house all weekend, and then carry it back to school untouched.
I do the reading whole group lesson plans, small group reading and math plans, and grading all on Sunday evening. I refuse to do work on Friday and Saturday nights.
LoL!! This is so me! Seriously though, I have two observations in the next week so I need to get my act together. I also have a day out for a doctor appt, half day meeting with teachers about interventions, and a full day field trip. This week my plans need to be impecable because I will have so many subs. EEks! To answer the question, I generally do some planning at home and I try to do it on a night my husband is gone (school or with friends) so it is less impeding on our family time. If I am not planning then I am usually analyzing data at home every few weeks. My prep is split and once a week I have to do hall duty instead of prep so fifteen/twenty minutes here and there does not really allow for productive planning.
I'm a first year teacher so I do a lot of lesson planning on the weekend as well as grading. I try to get my grading done during my prep period, but there just never seems to be enough time. If I need to make photo copies it takes 20-30 minutes to walk to the copier, wait in line, get it copied and walk back to my office. I'm in a very big school and the walk from my far corner of the building to the copier is close to 5 minutes at a fairly brisk pace. So unless there's no line at the copier, it really can be a big chunk of my planning period. Of course if I had my act better together I'd drop off my copies to be made by the gal who does it for us! Then it would just be the walk there and back. Anyway, my weekend amount of work is much higher than I'd like but I know it'll get easier as I re-teach my subject from term to term. The lesson planning will be mostly done, I'll just need to tweak it as necessary as the pacing might be different. I'll still have all the grading of course, but I'm hoping that'll become a bit easier for me to do as time goes on as well. Oh, and weekends also involve getting both kids to soccer games on Saturdays, helping them with their homework/projects, grocery shopping, laundry, etc., etc., etc.!!
I can't imagine what I would do if I had to plan everything myself. It takes me forever just to pull the materials! I plan one subject and I have a partner. Our plans have to follow a special model. Other subject plans are done by the rest of my team.
I spend time looking up interesting ways to teach things. Or I put together a unit. Right now, I plan on putting together a list of creepy science experiments for Halloween week. We'll be introducing matter, so it fits in perfectly. I found the one on fake snot here in one of the threads. Then I have to put together how I'm going to introduce informational writing and come up with the first prompt. I'll look over my past lessons and look through some books I have here and scan writing sites til I have one I'm satisfied with. Uh....first stop is here, though!
LOL... (Kicks self really hard and alerts to attention) Well, I do have to grade this weekend and upload my grades to GradeQuick. Besides that, I am being a major overachiever, developing differentiated reading centers for reading partnerships. I have a headache.
I just finished doing my lesson plans actually...but I only do it once every 3 weeks since we take turns, so I really can't complain. I usually take home anything I can get done at home, because I don't trust the computers at school to not crash, and of course, it is always nicer working in my pj's in front of the TV
Depending on the week, I usually take home grading and then some manuals to read over what I'll be doing that week. I try to plan out the following week in intervals throughout the week, but it didn't happen this week as I had something after school almost every day. I went into to school to do my lesson planning and some other random jobs today (fall bullentin board, copying, etc.)
Coloring :lol: At this point in the year I have to have a finished example to show the kids for most things we do. I have a few that I have kept and reused, but many things have to be done fresh for one reason or another. So, I color at home most weekends until spring when they have the hang of it, my old samples are good enough (because I don't have to physically demonstrate how to glue the papers), and I can color half of something and they get the idea (mostly). My team plans together on Tuesday, our aide runs copies for the things we all need, and I make copies on Tuesday/Wednesday for anything else. I write my formal plans on Wednesday most of the time. And by Friday it is all filed by day and I have my folder of coloring to take home
Jem, My first year of teaching I kept getting behind on grading. I felt bad because if a child was doing poorly the parent didn't know for a while because I hadn't graded anything. I lived with so much stress because of it. I made a vow my second year, and I've stuck with it like glue ever since! No matter what, I grade EVERYTHING within 24 hours and if it goes in the gradebook, I get it written in there too. No exceptions. Ever! Even if I'm on death's-door sick, I force myself to do it. I really need to do it right away because I base my next assignments on what the kids "didn't get." If they didn't do well on question 4 of a quiz, I make sure my morning work the next week has lots of examples of problems like question 4. It makes it so easy when progress reports are due or report cards, because I just have to hit my "transmit" button. I always know my grades are up-to-date. And since our parents can access our gradebooks online, there is no more "I didn't know my child had a missing assignment" excuse. (We have computers available afterschool and in the early evening for parents who don't have computers or internet access at home, and they can always check from any public library.) Sorry for getting off topic --
