Back to school season is one of the most challenging times of the year. But there are some ways to reduce your stress and stay sane this year. Here are 5 tips to help out new and veteran teachers alike:​ 

Tip #1:  Keep a paper copy of parent information. 
​It's inevitable that just when the computer system, or the internet, or the power, or some other form of infrastructure goes out, you will need to be able to get ahold of a parent. I keep a lot of information on my computer, but I always, always have a binder with a paper copy that includes parent information and student transportation information.

During back to school night, I have my parents complete my Important Information Sheet. One simple page, hole punched, stuck in a binder, and I always have the ability to call home, and get my kids home. I also take this same binder with me on every field trip. I can't tell you how many times I've used it.

Tip #3: Have puzzles ready during one on one assessments. 
Puzzles are fabulous for so many things - academic skills, problem solving skills, etc. However, they are also something that can easily be picked up and put back down without stressing out the classroom or your students too much. For this reason, I use puzzles as what the class is working on while I need to pull students for one on one assessments in the beginning of the year.

Sometimes I use regular jigsaw puzzles, but most often I use Self-Correcting Puzzles or Tiling Puzzles. We all know that there's too much curriculum to cover, so having students beginning to play with curriculum puzzles before I start teaching curriculum gives them a foot up and starts building background knowledge. For additional ideas on how to keep kids busy during assessments, check out my blog post - How to Keep Students Engaged While You Are Doing Assessments.

Tip#4: Observe your students working in groups. 
How students interact with each other will dictate the types of activities you will and won't be able to complete with your students this year. During the first two weeks, have students work on a variety of activities in groups, when you are NOT busy assessing, organizing supplies, or other beginning of the year activities. While they are working, walk around with a clipboard and take notes. Who are your natural leaders? Who gets off task easily? Who takes over and doesn't let others work? Who doesn't want to participate? Better than any get to know you game, watching kids interact with their peers will tell you a lot about the personalities, abilities, and motivations of your students. 
Pinterest is full of cute STEM ideas that would work for these group projects, but if you need to start building in curriculum, think outside the box. Have the kids work in a group to create a mini test using my Be the Teacher worksheets, or have students work together to complete an internet scavenger hunt. Really any assignment can be made into a group task that you can observe to gather this information. 

Tip #5: Start practicing math facts from the get go. 
I have never worked at a school that didn't have a goal of building math fact fluency.  We generally wait for about a month before we start taking stock of where we are and what we need to do. And then very often we spent a lot of time going back and re-teaching or re-practicing the facts from the previous year. I have never understood this delay.

I start math facts on the first couple of days, often starting with last year's facts to build up confidence. Then when everyone else is build a routine a month in, my kids are already used to daily practice. Plus, they have often refreshed their memory of last year's facts and are ready to move on to more challenging facts. I use my Math Fact Quiz package to meet  my kids wherever they are in the spectrum of fact fluency over all 4 operations.

We have already talked about setting up your digital classroom, exploring technology tools, exploring both digital and paper formats for teaching resources, building up a communication system for parents, digging deep into your standards and making prerecorded teaching videos. Today we will discuss something else all teachers should do to prepare for next school year:

You can create a classroom management system that will work with in class learning AND digital learning.

One of the most challenging things about distance learning for me personally was that I could not longer pass out dragon tickets (our school's PBIS rewards), which were the backbone of my positive behavior system. However, because I had built strong relationships with my kiddos, I was able to do very low key rewards like shout outs that helped keep my kiddos on track. 

Now as we look at going into a school year that MAY begin with distance learning OR hybrid learning, we need to think long and hard about what kind of classroom management system we will need to develop in order to teach children that we may NEVER see in person. Two years ago, I wrote the blog post: Classroom Management Strategies to Get Your Class to Do Their Best. In this blog post, I said that in order to build up your classroom management system, you need to:

1.) Have clear expectations. 
2.) Have good procedures and routines.
3.) Get to know your students well.
4.) Offer a variety of rewards.

All of these steps are still true if we are doing distance learning OR hybrid learning, so it is worth thinking about how each of these would need to be tweaked for a distance learning situation or a hybrid learning situation.

What will classroom management look like in digital or hybrid learning?

Having clear expectations in an online environment means knowing what to expect. Although this is slightly more challenging, it's also all the more reason to play with those technology tools BEFORE you need to use them to teach. By playing with them, you know what to tell your students that you expect. Additionally, explaining clear expectations in a distance learning environment, especially with younger students, might mean explaining those expectations to the parents as well. Since parents control the home environment, it will be important to communicate these clear expectations of how students should act in class with both parents AND students.

Having good procedures and routines will be important in digital and in person environments, but it will be MOST important in a hybrid situation where students may be moving between distance and in person environments. One of the procedures that will be extremely important will be having a clearly organized digital classroom (like Google Classroom or Edmodo) that students understand how to use. Be very clear with directions. And most importantly, keep these directions consistent with in class routines when students are working from a distance. If the distance learning looks completely different than the in class learning, you are asking students to learn double the procedures and routines.

Getting to know a student that you aren't in a classroom with for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, seems challenging. However, when I reread the blog post: Get to Know Your Students Better: Top 10 Strategies that Go Beyond the Beginning of the Year Ice Breakers that I wrote a few years ago, I came up with ways to make almost every strategy work within a distance learning environment. The one big challenge for me personally with be monitoring group work, as I use Google Meet, which does not allow breakout sessions. Those of you using Zoom should have less challenges with this one. But honestly, if you are having any kind of group interactions with your with your students, you can learn a lot about your students by who is and who isn't speaking up when.

Finally, rewards. In the past few years I had been encouraged to move away from digital behavior tracking systems like Class Dojo, and this meant that I had no way of rewarding my students during our live Google Meet lessons. Because I don't know what next year is going to look like, I know that next year I WILL have a digital behavior tracking system that can work WITH a paper system. This may be something like Class Dojo, Bloomz, or Class Craft, or something as simple as recording "points" with a Google Form. Additionally, I will provide rewards to kiddos that can be done in a digital system OR a physical system. I always allow students to pick a reward after they have collected a set number of tickets. (For 3rd grade it was 20 tickets.)

Some of the rewards I plan to include next year are: wearing a hat or sunglasses to class, show and tell passes, telling the class a joke, the student getting to choose MY hairstyle for the day, positive phone calls home, getting to sing a song to the class, getting to do a directed drawing, or getting to choose the GoNoodle video we watch.  Of course in addition to these large rewards, I need to be more intentional about doing verbal shout outs and virtual high fives for my kiddos. It's easy to lose track of the need for these when you are not sitting right next to the kiddos. Since all of these rewards can be done in person OR digitally, having this set up will help me regardless of what the Fall looks like.

FREE Resources for Your Classroom

As you take some time to think about your classroom management system, here are some free resources which may help you out:

Student Book Review Bookmarks - Kiddos can rate the books they read so that others know if it is a good or bad book to read.

Math Fact Reward System - Students get to color in symbols to show they have mastered different levels of math fact fluency.

Memory Card Game Template - Create a game for your students for any topic. Or let them make the game! Makes a great "learning" reward.

If you're a teacher reading this, I'm going to tell you something you already know. Teachers are planners. Does anyone else remember filling out "Reflective Teaching Logs" when you were in college? These logs felt like such a waste of time while I was filling them out, but now I realize that they were preparing us for what teachers do each and every day. As we teach a lesson, we're mentally preparing for how to make this lesson better the next time we teach it. We do this each and every day with little things, but even more with big things, like setting routines and procedures. Halfway through a school year I have already made decisions that "Next year I'm going to do this differently next year." Before we finish one school year, we've already begun planning the next school year, and we spend a good part of our summer preparing (mentally and with new resources) for these tweaks, updates and changes. 

This year, thanks to Covid 19, is different because we don't know what to expect out of next year. Will we be back to distance learning? Will we be in our classrooms? Will we be working on a hybrid system? Will we be in and out of our classrooms and digital environments throughout the school year? I've read all the blog posts speculating what it can, should and will look like. However, the end result is that we don't know and all the speculation in the world isn't going to change that. All of the not knowing can be very stressful, and it can make it hard to make good use of this time when we normally prepare ourselves for next year. However, there are some things that we can do to prepare. 

So, here are 10 things that you CAN do this summer to be prepared for the 2020/2021 school year, no matter what it looks like:

1.) You can prepare a digital classroom. 

2.) You can explore new technology tools. 

3.) You can search out new resources that will work with in class learning AND digital learning. 

4.) You can make a plan for improving parent communication. 

5.) You can dig deep into your standards and your curriculum. 

6.) You can create teaching videos. 

7.) You can create reward systems that will work with in class learning AND digital learning. 

8.) You can consider differentiation options. 

9.) You can explore ways to find a balance between parental and teaching responsibilities. 

​10.) You can take time for self care. 

Be sure you come back each day to find the linked blog posts, and the giveaway entry forms! What are you doing to prepare for next year?

Back to school sales, back to school planning, back to school shopping - it feels like my world right now surrounds around the back to school season right now. Is anyone else there?  In addition to preparing for the Teachers Pay Teachers 2 Day Back to School Sale, which is going on now (Aug 1 & Aug 2, 2018), I have been putting the finishing touches on my Back to School Escape Room. I'm going to be using this with my classroom  AFTER I have taught all of my procedures and routines. This will be our final "back to school" activity before heading into the heavy beast of curriculum, but I wanted to have it finished before I get back into the daily routine of school on Monday.

Now normally, I try out every resource I sell in my classroom BEFORE posting it on Teachers Pay Teachers. However, I wanted to make sure that others benefited from this highly engaging back to school escape room this year. So I decided to go ahead and list it early, and then leave it FREE - just for the month of August. My hope is that other teachers will try it out and let me know if they find any glitches. I can then fix any glitches before it becomes a paid product on September 1st. ​ So if you or your colleagues want to be a trial classroom for my Back to School Escape Room, please download it at my Teachers Pay Teachers store BEFORE September 1st. Then after you have completed the activity with your kids, please send me an e-mail at the address provided in the escape room to let me know how it went!

Here's hoping your back to school season goes well! It's going to be the best year yet!

2.) Get to know your students' goals.  This year I started out the year with my Long Term Goals Sheet, where I asked students to work with their parents and think about where they want to be in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years. It was a great way to get to know my students on a new and different level. Hearing their college and career aspirations made each of these students so much more real to me. Now the student who wants to fix computers is a "tech support helper" who I have introduced to code.org and the student who wants to travel to multiple countries is reading books about those countries and studying French on Duolingo.com. Knowing who the students want to be when they are an adult, even if they're only in 3rd grade now, allows me to break into their interest levels in a completely different way. 

3.) Read their writing. The way that a student responds to a writing prompt says so much about the student. For example my students are currently writing narrative stories about a picture of a girl falling off of a swing. The stories I got range from a first person narrative where the main character helps a girl who falls off a swing and wins an instant friend; to a story where aliens were purposely breaking the swing each time the main character sits on it. In between, I also got a story where the main character's mother fell in love with the doctor who helped her and one story where the girl was pushed on purpose and the pusher got a large punishment. Reading each of these stories with my students helped me to better understand their background knowledge and their viewpoint as well as their writing ability. I often use my Genre Writing Journals as a way to give the entire class the same prompt.