- Tuesday 13 August 2024
Summer holidays are the prime time to rest and recharge after a busy year of teaching (and maybe catch up on those tv shows you’ve been wanting to watch) ... but it’s also a great opportunity to get ahead for the new school year.
Even just putting a few hours of your break towards some planning and prep can go a long way when Term 1 begins, and in this article, we want to help you make the most of this valuable time.
Reflect on the past year
Take a moment to reflect on your past year of teaching.
What worked well in your lesson delivery? What teaching strategies worked well? What are your strengths, and what lesson planning methods worked best for you?
Now, reflect on what needs improvement. What didn’t go to plan? What teaching strategies should you switch up? What lesson planning methods didn’t work for you?
Pacing decisions
When you have more time, you can essentially create a year-long view of your curriculum, including all the units that need to be taught and the deadlines for testing and assessments.
This will help you with pacing decisions and ensuring you’re putting enough time towards teaching each subject. It will also give you an indicator of how long you need to plan ahead for and the dates by which you’ll need to sit down and do more planning.
Having this outline can be a huge weight off your shoulders because it means you’re not on edge every week, wondering what else needs to be done or whether you’ve missed something important.
It also ensures you don’t have to make as many decisions as you go because you’ve made all those decisions for when things need to be completed well in advance.
Batch lessons by units of study
Once you have your year-long overview, you can decide how you want to plan the year’s lessons.
You might strive to batch lessons 3–5 weeks ahead at a time (for example, you might batch English units on spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc).
Or, you might batch the entire unit ahead at once, but stick to one subject area (for example, report writing).
Next, tweak the duration of each unit as needed, and remember to factor in testing weeks and seasonal holidays that may arise.
Finally, add upcoming lesson planning dates and the units you still need to plan for to your calendar alongside your teaching schedule, and this will help you stay on track with your yearly plan, while breaking up your to-dos in a manageable way.
Batch weekly rotations and daily schedule
What if you had four weeks' worth of maths and literacy activity rotations packed up in containers or folders, ready for pupils to use?
Or what if you had a maths or English resource that could be used by your pupils, day by day, to fill your morning timeslots, leaving you with more flexibility in the afternoons?
We have a great article here that goes into more depth on how to use our daily skills builder books and box sets to prepare activities and schedules ahead of time. Take a look, and if you have some extra time, consider preparing these on your summer holidays as well!
Rest and recharge
You now have the plan and framework, and all your decisions have been dated and laid out. It’s time to kick back, relax, and enjoy the rest of your summer holidays – because your most inspired and creative lesson ideas are going to come to you when you take the time to fully recharge, so that you can enter the new school year strong!