It's Cori from Mrs. B's Beehive! Today I wanted to talk to you about teaching procedures at the beginning of the school year.
We all know how important it is to set the tone, and clearly communicate our expectations at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year, your class will be running like a well oiled machine.
By May, I've got all my little teacher helpers organizing things for me just the way that I like them. I often forget, (probably on purpose) just how much time it takes to get them to that point! There are so many little pieces of information that I need my students to understand to make sure that the day is focused on learning, and that I am not spending my time running around behind them cleaning and correcting.
I wanted to share with you what my first week's schedule looks like:
Like most other teachers, I read a lot of back to school books. I do a lot of activities around those books and start my preliminary assessments. In between all of those activities, is the teaching of procedure after procedure. In the first week I try to prioritize my most important procedures, and go over the ones that will be most effective in establishing a smooth running classroom. (Don't touch the fire alarm!). Even a simple task such as entering the classroom in the morning, has many different components.
To help myself remember everything that I need to teach them, I made this procedure checklist. I keep it right next to my first week (and second and third week) lesson plans. As I teach a procedure, I check it off the list.
There are many times that I find an extra minute here or there in the first couple of weeks, and I quickly scan over my procedures list, and see if there is any information that I can squeeze in to a lesson, to make sure that the students fully understand my expectations.
If you would like a free copy of this Back to School Procedures Checklist, click HERE, or on any of the pictures above.
This list has worked well for me over the last couple of years, and I hope it is something that you will find useful as well as you gear up for back to school!
I assume you only do half day kindergarten with this schedule? I wish we had that much time to actually work on things! We have an hour long assembly the first day, and then PBIS Bootcamp for an hour to an hour and a half each day for the next 3 days. It takes up so much time!!
ReplyDeleteCarlee Van Ness
The Kindergarten Press
Hi Carlee!
DeleteWe have half day all the first week, and we just mainly focus on procedures. After that, we have a full day schedule from 8am-3pm. I honestly don't know how half day kindergarten classrooms fit it all in!
I also don't know why administration schedules all of those things, when you need your little people to start learning about your classroom and routines. It's just like when they schedule all of those PD meeting when we need to work on our classroom! : )