Finishing the school year can be very stressful. Consider these ways for helping you cope with the stress.
With fourteen teaching days left to go, I should be elated for the long summer vacation ahead. I have a summer reading list, and plenty of writing tasks. I can just see it.. long summer trips to the beach, building sandcastles and just chilling.
Yet, from a teacher point of view, preparing for the end of the school year is a lot of hard work. There are grades to prepare, recommendations and summer exams to prepare, last minute papers to grade.
I like to bring fresh new ideas into the classroom and that means preparing end of the school year games.
It's a Saturday morning and in writing this, I am already looking at my schedule for today. It is filed with taking care of my 2.5 year old,and sqeezing time to have a few quick marking sessions. Just in case you haven't been thinking about how to avoid becoming too frazzled by the end of the year preparation, here are a few tips that have worked for me.
1. As soon as you get a student load of marking , check it before another load piles up.
2. Set a designated time during the weekend where you can look at the week ahead and get ahead on your planning.
I'm the kind of person that likes to start the week anew with no student marking. Marking can also be very time consuming and I prefer to use a system that is helpful from the start.
When I'm pressed for time, (and I usually am)I tend to use ideas that have worked for previous classes such as Bingo, already prepared trivia questions and hangman. I try to keep a bagful of prizes.
One more piece of advice: Don't rely too heavily on your lesson plan. Keep in mind that the dynamics of the interaction in the classroom are stimulating, and at the last minute, you can change your lesson plan 90 degrees the other way. Every day is different.
