Thriving with Routines - A Weekly ‘To-Do’

Classroom Management Strategies for Teachers As we've stressed before, writing things down and being intentional about instituting routines is the key to success when it comes to keeping routines in the classroom setting. While day-to-day maintenance is crucial, weekly routines are also important for staying caught up and putting your best foot forward when you return to the classroom after the weekend.

DURING THE WEEK

While most items on your weekly to-do list are likely 'housekeeping' items that make more sense as end-of-the-week duties, we do highly recommend getting into a lesson planning routine during the week. Chunking is a strategy that allows you to group like tasks in order to complete a project more efficiently. For example, after planning your reading exercises for the next week, you wouldn't make a trip down to the copy room just to make the copies you need for that specific subject area. Most likely, you would wait until you'd planned your science, math, etc. lessons then make one trip and copy everything at the same time. By breaking a project up into manageable and convenient chunks (like one trip to the copy room) you'll not only creates efficiency when tackling lesson planning, but will also (hopefully!) be able to stick with it! You'll find some great tips and tricks for establishing your own lesson planning routine in our first post of the series --> {Thriving with Routines} Strategies for Lesson Planning.

AT THE END OF EACH WEEK

  1. Pass out all papers. Even if you make it a point to pass out papers daily, there are certain to be miscellaneous items that need to be handed back.
  2. Have students take five minutes at the end of the day (on Friday) to clean out their desks, mailboxes, cubbies, etc. Direct your students' attention to the clean desk model - along with the items that SHOULD be in their desks. Anything that does not belong in their desk should be separated into three piles - "Home", "Teacher", and "Trash/Recycling". There's nothing like coming back to school on a Monday morning to a clean desk!
  3. File and store all curriculum used during the week.

You, of course, know your classroom and, while these are more generic suggestions, we're sure you'll be to be able to expound upon them to better serve your classroom needs!