You’re probably enjoying relaxing right now during your summer off. And the new school year is probably sitting at the back of your mind. But, what if I could help you out already? Today I’m sharing five time-saving tips for your classroom. And they’re going to help you have a great new school year!
1. Backups
When I’m prepping for the new school year, I always ensure that I make back ups of important resources – specifically visuals.
Have you ever gone to complete your students visual schedules, and then realised that you’re missing a symbol? And your students are due into school in 10 minutes time! Now you have to get on your computer, find your file, print the symbol, cut it, laminate it, velcro it, and get it onto the schedule in 10 minutes!
That’s a lot of stress. But, what if you had a backup of symbols already made? Then, you’d have a less stressful 10 minutes. Because all you need to do is go to your backup storage box and pull out that symbol you need.
That extra 10 minutes of prepping before school starts of extra symbols, is so worth it for the rest of the school year.
2. Craft Prep
Prep your craft activities for the term at the start of the year. Print out photographs of the crafts that you want to make. Then, put them into individual folders.
Prep all of the materials that your students will need to complete the crafts and place them into the folders.
3. Organisation
Find an organisation method that works for you at the start of the year. Get everything organised in your classroom for the term or the rest of the whole year.
By having an organisation set up from the start of the year, you can save yourself a lot of time throughout the year.
Spend ten minutes and think to yourself..
- What did you struggle with most last year for organisation?
- How can you organise your paperwork?
- What ways can you set up your planning for the year?
- How can you organise your year so that your staff members can be independent and more helpful for you?
- What type of organiser are you? How do you organise your life at home? Can you introduce this type of organisation into your classroom?
4. Relationships
You may be wondering how can relationships help you to save time in the classroom this year? Well, there’s a lot of ways.
By establishing strong and professional relationships with your team of staff, they’ll know about you and your teaching style. From here, they’ll be able to know how to help you run the classroom more effectively. They’ll be able to be more independent and know what they are doing – and what you need them to do. And all of this will help you to save time throughout the year.
And on this note, building relationships with your students and their families can also be helpful to save you time through the year. Spending time at the start of year to build relationships with your students families can have a long term effect throughout the year. It means that your families know what to expect from you, what you’ll communicate with them – and how they can communicate with you.
And by building relationships with your students – they’ll trust you more. This will lead to a more efficiently run and positive classroom.
5. Rules and Procedures
Spend your first week or two of school taking the time to teach your students about rules and procedures for your classroom. This will save you time through the school year.
By spending time ensuring your students know what the rules and procedures for your classroom are from the start, you won’t have to keep going over them throughout the year. You may need to do quick refreshers – but you won’t have to do constant lessons on them.
This will also mean that everyone knows what to do in different situations in your classroom. If you’ve never practised fire drills – then there’s one randomly one day. How will your students know what to do? It’s going to take you all much longer to evacuate if nobody knows what to expect or what to do.
What are your best time-saving tips for the classroom? Let us know in the comments below! You may also be interested in our online self-paced training course for autism and special education teachers. Find out more information here.
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