4 Dismissal Routine Tips for Teachers to Calm the End-of-Day Chaos [episode 160]

Emily  0:37

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. Today we’ve got four teacher approved tips for taming the chaos in your end of day dismissal routine, and we’re sharing a fun idea for getting your room cleaned up.

Heidi  0:50

We start our episodes with the morning message, just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is what is your first chapter book read aloud for the year? Emily, did you have a go to?

Emily  1:02

Yes, I usually did Gooney Bird Green for a first read aloud in second grade. She loves her such a hoot.

Heidi  1:09

It’s a fun one. I always like to start with Freckle Juice by Judy Bloom because it’s short, like we could read it in two days, and it has kind of a fun hook, and I have freckles, so felt like a bonding moment.

Emily  1:24

We asked the question in our Facebook community, and here are some of their responses. Marsha likes Mercy Watson and then Charlotte’s Web. Erica reads How to Be Cool in Third Grade. Nicole’s pick is The One and Only Ivan. Jenny says Monster and Boy, it’s so good and always leaves them wanting more. Melissa’s go to is A Snicker of Magic, which I am not familiar with, but I am hooked from the title.

Heidi  1:51

That is a fun title.

Emily  1:53

Jennifer and Betsy both read Lulu and the Brontosaurus to their classes.

Heidi  1:57

I didn’t know that one. I had to look it up, and it looks really cute.

Emily  2:00

Faith recommends the Lion of Mars, which is another one that’s new to me, but it does look amazing. Cindy reads Nya Nuki, which is based on a true story of a Shoshone girl who has to escape and return to her family. Sherry reads Clementine.

Heidi  2:16

Love that one such a good one.

Emily  2:19

April reads All About Sam and Amber’s first read aloud is the perfect pick for her firsties, Junie B, First Grader.

Heidi  2:28

All stellar choices.

Emily  2:29

We’d love to hear about your first read aloud. Come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Heidi  2:35

How is it going, everyone? We’re in the middle of September now. Are you getting back in the swing of things?

Emily  2:42

It’s okay if things are still a little bumpy. It’s early days yet, but today we’re going to talk about how to smooth out some of those bumps.

Heidi  2:51

Specifically, we are talking about how to streamline your dismissal routine.

Emily  2:56

In teacher talk, we sometimes use routines and procedures as synonyms, and I am very guilty of that, but they are not quite the same thing, actually.

Heidi  3:05

Right. Calling a routine a procedure is like calling your bed a mattress. Hopefully your bed has a mattress, but your bed is more than a mattress. It takes pillows and sheets and blankets all working together to make your mattress a nice, cozy bed.

Emily  3:22

Instead of being made of sheets and pillows, your class routines are made of individual procedures. Those procedures work together to create a system that accomplishes more than the individual procedures could do on their own.

Heidi  3:34

A procedure is a process with a clear outcome and specific steps to follow. When we link a series of procedures in an efficient sequence, we create a routine.

Emily  3:46

Now it might feel like we’re splitting hairs here, because we’re good at that, but the differences between procedures and routines matter. If you try to teach your third graders a whole routine at once, you will spend all year reminding and redirecting.

Heidi  4:00

However, separately, teaching each procedure in a routine before trying to link them will solve so many future problems.

Emily  4:09

To do that, you need to know what individual procedures are making up your routine.

Heidi  4:14

When it comes to dismissal, you probably need students to clean up their desk, clean up the room, maybe do class jobs, maybe fill out an agenda or a planner.

Emily  4:23

You probably need to hand out papers and folders. Some kids will need to get their lunch boxes. Plus, there are likely things that have to happen to set the room up for the morning.

Heidi  4:32

Each one of those tasks is a separate procedure, and if you are struggling with your end of day routine, and it is common to have problems at this time of day. It might be because you haven’t broken down your routine in enough detail.

Emily  4:46

In order to do that, you first need to answer these 10 questions. Kind of makes me feel like a wizard guarding a bridge or something.

Heidi  4:55

You need a rhyme.

Emily  4:55

Answer my questions 10.

Emily  4:59

First you need to know your school policies.

Heidi  5:02

That should be an easy one to check off your list. But since we are a few weeks into the school year now, you probably want to chat with someone if you don’t know what the school expects at dismissal.

Emily  5:13

Questions two and three are also easy. Question two is, what is the last academic part of your day? And Question three is, where is your class at dismissal time?

Heidi  5:25

Hopefully you know your schedule well enough to know what’s happening right before it’s time to start cleaning up and packing up.

Emily  5:31

The dismissal time question may seem obvious, but if your class won’t be in your room at the end of the day, that impacts the decisions you need to make.

Heidi  5:40

Yeah, maybe your students have specialty classes at the end of the day, or maybe recesses at the very end of the day, and your students are dismissed from the playground. That type of schedule will have an impact on how you structure your dismissal routine.

Emily  5:53

Question four is, what do students need to take home? Maybe they just need backpacks. Maybe they need backpacks and water bottles and lunch boxes and folders and reading books and papers and notebooks, the amount of items kids need impacts how much time it takes to get ready.

Heidi  6:10

Question five is, what has to happen to reset the room for the morning? This one is key, because the success of your morning often depends on what happens the night before. Do you have to do a big cleaning job or just stack the chairs? Have your kids help with as many tasks as possible.

Emily  6:28

Now that you know all the things that need to happen before the bell rings, we’re ready for question six. What time do you need to start all this preparation? You don’t want to be rushing around at the last minute. So give yourself as long of a runway as you can.

Heidi  6:42

Question seven is an important one. How do you keep students engaged while all of this is happening? You are so tired by this point in the day that it is tempting to let kids entertain themselves, but dismissal time will be much smoother and much calmer if you give kids something to do in those last few minutes.

Emily  7:01

And finally it’s time for the bell, which brings us to question eight. What happens when the bell rings? Does everyone leave at once? Do kids leave as their bus is called?

Heidi  7:12

And question nine is about you. What responsibilities do you have? If you have to hustle outside to do crosswalk duty or direct the car rider line, or monitor bus lines, or even just manage kids in the hallways that will impact your routines.

Emily  7:27

And that brings us to question 10. How are these plans impacted by bad weather or by early dismissal days?

Heidi  7:35

All of these questions are in our guiding questions for procedure resource. Now, they weren’t in this order originally, but I’ve moved things around. So if you want all of these questions written down for you with space to record your responses, definitely check that out. There’s a link to it in the show notes.

Emily  7:51

In that resource, there are even more questions like this for your dismissal routine, and 25 other procedures. I love using guiding questions because they’re so helpful for pinpointing what is most important about your procedures and helping you troubleshoot any tricky spots.

Heidi  8:09

Hopefully these questions aren’t overwhelming, if anything, they should be validating, even if you didn’t sit down to thoughtfully consider your answer to each one of these questions, you managed to put together a dismissal routine.

Emily  8:22

And when you see it all listed out like that, you can see that it’s not your fault that the end of the day gets a little hairy. There’s a lot going on at a time when you’re tired and a little grumpy and don’t feel like micromanaging 25 small humans who are also tired and grumpy.

Heidi  8:36

It is a lot. So let’s talk about some ways we can revamp our end of day routine. We have four teacher approved tips to help you simplify and smoothify this process so that everyone ends the day with a smile on their face, even the very tired teacher.

Emily  8:54

To start our revamping process, let’s go back to question two. What is the last academic part of your day? If you have any control over your daily schedule, do yourself a favor and schedule a calm activity for the last few minutes of the academic day.

Emily  9:08

Consider things like journal writing, handwriting, read alouds, a closing meeting, choice time, computer games, typing practice. Should I keep going? Review enrichment or any other gentle way to wrap up the academic day. That’s our first tip.

Heidi  9:25

With my second graders, our last station time was right before the end of the day. And with our preschoolers, we had singing time last. I purposely scheduled those activities at the end for two reasons.

Heidi  9:37

First, they created a cushion. If something else in the day ran long, those activities were easy to shorten or even just to skip altogether. I didn’t want to be racing through a math lesson to fit it in right before the bell. And second, I wanted something that was easy to wrap up. The preschoolers didn’t really need any supplies for music, besides maybe a few props. So it was simple to clean up and pack up from that point.

Heidi  10:03

And having my second graders clean up their stations was a little more involved, but it really wasn’t too bad, because all of the materials were kept right at that station that they were visiting. They could easily put their stuff away and then transition to the rug or to their jobs.

Emily  10:16

And speaking of jobs, our second tip for revamping your end of day routine is to assign class jobs. This is where questions four and five come into play. What do students need to take home? What has to happen to tidy the room? And what has to happen to reset the room for tomorrow morning? The answer to all of those questions can be addressed by class jobs.

Heidi  10:38

There’s a difference between student responsibilities and student jobs. Everyone has responsibilities at the end of the day, but everyone might not have a job.

Emily  10:47

In my class, all of the kids were expected to tidy their desks, turn in pencils, check their cubbies and load up their backpacks. Those were their responsibilities. But a few of my kids had jobs at the end of the day, like resetting the attendance chart, handing out folders and take home books, unpacking the lunch tab and sharpening pencils, all that fun stuff that has to happen.

Heidi  11:07

This will vary from class to class based on how you use class jobs. Some teachers have a student of the day who handles most of the jobs, and some teachers assign every student a job each day.

Emily  11:18

And lots of teachers are somewhere in the middle. If your class job system is working for you, stick with it by all means. Just make sure that some of those jobs are making the end of the day easier.

Heidi  11:28

Yeah, you could have end of day jobs for handing out papers, tidying the library, erasing the board and anything else that needs to be done before the kids leave. A good rule of thumb is that if kids can do a task, you should expect them to do it. It’s how they learn cooperation and responsibility.

Emily  11:45

Plus, you have plenty of tasks the kids can’t help with, so definitely delegate to them what you can assign those class jobs.

Heidi  11:53

Our third tip is to give yourself as much time as you can for your end of day routine. As we mentioned at the top of the episode, a routine is made by sequencing a series of procedures, and a procedure is a process with a clear outcome and specific steps to follow. So every separate task that you want your students to complete as they pack up for the day is a separate procedure.

Emily  12:17

That means you need a procedure for having students tidy their desks, a procedure for handing out materials that need to go home, a procedure for sharpening pencils and so many other end of day tasks.

Heidi  12:28

Plus, you need a separate procedure for each class job that has to be done at the end of the day. So do yourself a favor and use the tell, try tally talk method to teach each of your procedures in detail.

Emily  12:40

Ideally, you’ll want to teach your end of day routine before it’s end of the day. You don’t want the pressure of the bell ringing when you’re trying to have a meaningful discussion about how to fill out the daily agenda.

Heidi  12:51

Now that won’t be calm for anyone. After you have taught each procedure in your routine, leave a large buffer of time for the first few weeks. Your end of day routine is the hinge event that has to happen before everyone’s favorite fixed event, the dismissal bell.

Heidi  13:09

At the first of the year your hinge events take more time, so don’t panic if it is taking 20 minutes to get your room straightened and the kids packed up. It’s still early days. In a few weeks, you will be able to tighten things up.

Emily  13:21

But ideally, even when the kids have mastered the routine, leave a comfortable buffer of time to get everything done. I scheduled 15 minutes all year long, everyone is worn out by the end of the day, and having a rush dismissal is going to make things even harder to manage.

Heidi  13:35

And that brings us to our fourth tip, and maybe the most important tip, and that’s to have something to engage students while they wait. In my class, we cleaned up stations at three o’clock. The kids did their responsibilities of tidying their desks, turning in their pencils to be sharpened, and stacking their chairs.

Heidi  13:55

Then my kids would kind of spread out. The kids with class jobs, went to start their jobs, and the rest of the class joined me at the rug for our read aloud. And then, while I was reading aloud from Jigsaw Jones or whatever, I was reading, the kids with jobs or sharpening pencils, handing out papers and folders and books and all of the rest.

Heidi  14:13

Doing read aloud kept the kids doing jobs quiet, and it kept the rest of the class engaged. So no one was getting out of control, but the important tasks were getting done. After 10 minutes so this would be about 3:10 I dismissed kids a few at a time to start packing up. Everything they needed to take home was already at their desks thanks to the kids with the jobs. So the kids just needed to grab their backpacks and load up.

Emily  14:37

Staggering kids during any transition, but especially at the end of the day is such a useful tip, it prevents traffic jams that escalate to pushing.

Heidi  14:46

Yeah. no one wants one more headache at the end of the day. So send kids in small groups, if you can. Once my students were packed up, they could line up at the door. If they were ready early, we might sing a song or two while we waited. And then when the bell rang. I just gave them a high five or a hug as they left, unless, of course, it was my day for bus duty, and then I would just tell them to hurry and go while, I grabbed my sunglasses and raced outside.

Emily  15:11

How this works in your room will largely depend on what else is happening at dismissal. If you need to have kids packed up and ready to go before they go to specialty classes for the last half hour of the day, you’ll need a different system than someone who might have kids lingering in their room for 20 minutes after the bell rings, waiting for their bus number to be announced.

Heidi  15:31

But with a little creativity, you can do a lot to minimize that empty waiting around downtime. If you don’t want to do a read aloud, you could listen to an audiobook or a kid friendly podcast.

Emily  15:43

I know I’ve seen a lot of teachers project calming videos like fish swimming or soap cutting. Since the videos don’t have a plot, you don’t have to worry about getting through the whole story.

Heidi  15:52

Another idea is to have everyone pack up and come with backpacks and all to the rug for a closing circle. Or you could have the kids pack up and stand in line so everything is absolutely ready to go. And then you can fill your waiting time with line activities like singing Action Songs or playing I spy or everyone’s favorite, the quiet game.

Emily  16:11

The key to being successful with filling time is to have what you need in advance. If you want to show videos, make a playlist ahead of time. If your kids are waiting in the line for five to 10 minutes, make a bank of line activities now. No one has the brain power at the end of the day to make a bunch of extra decisions.

Heidi  16:30

The end of the day can be chaotic, but it doesn’t have to be. Clearly teach each of the procedures in your routine and remember our four tips: end your day’s learning with a calm activity, assign end of day class jobs, leave as much time as possible for your end of day routine, and make sure to keep kids engaged while they wait.

Emily  16:50

And don’t forget to use the guiding questions in today’s episode and in our guiding questions resource to help troubleshoot any tricky spots.

Heidi  16:59

And we would love to hear how you tame the chaos at the end of the day. Come join the conversation in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  17:05

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip. Each week we leave you with a small, actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is make cleaning up a game. What can you tell us about this, Heidi?

Heidi  17:20

Most days, it hopefully doesn’t take too much to tidy your class, but we all know that there are some days it looks like a pack of angry badgers turned loose in there. On those days, instead of having a couple of kids tidy the room as a class job, you might need to enlist the whole crew to help. We’ve talked about one of our favorite tips, which is secret scrap, where the teacher announces that they’ve chosen a scrap on the floor, and whoever picks it gets a reward.

Heidi  17:21

Now whether you actually choose a scrap on the floor, or you just choose a kid to be the winner because they need a little extra love that day, or you can tell they’re working hard. That’s totally up to you we will not tell.

Heidi  18:01

Secret scrap is always a winner, but I recently came across another idea from the sassy apple that is a lot of fun. So she calls it tape monsters. And what she does is she gives each kid a little strip of packing tape to wrap around two of their fingers.

Heidi  18:18

Then the kids need to feed their tape monster by picking up all of the loose bits on the floor, you know, going around with the tape and, like, pressing it on all the scraps on the floor. And it’s so she adds to the fun by awarding random points. Like, oh, that one ain’t so much. I think it’s worth 50 points. You know, the points don’t matter. They’re all made up. But she says it adds to the fun.

Emily  18:39

That sounds like so much fun. And you know, the kids would be all in they’ll be begging to clean up the floor. But like with any activity of surprise and delight, it only keeps its magic if it’s used rarely. So maybe save those tape monsters for just a few times a year.

Heidi  18:55

To wrap up the show we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily  19:00

I’m giving extra credit to you, Heidi.

Heidi  19:02

Oh, that’s nice.

Emily  19:03

And to the rest of our family. My 40th birthday was last week, and they all went in together to get me a little free library. So now I just have to decide which one I want, which just feels like a lot of commitment. I’m gonna have to be sure and then get it installed.

Emily  19:21

But I’ve been wanting one for a while, so I’m so excited to have my own little library. Kind of feel like this is fulfilling a childhood dream of mine. If I can’t be a real librarian, I can be a little free library librarian. It was a very good surprise.

Heidi  19:36

Well happy birthday. You deserve it.

Emily  19:39

It’s true. I do. What are you giving extra credit to Heidi?

Heidi  19:43

My extra credit goes to the movie Sleepless in Seattle. You know that a new release that it is. But specifically that scene where Rita Wilson recounts the plot to an Affair to Remember, you know what I’m talking about?

Emily  19:57

Well you know know I know.

Heidi  20:01

Yeah, it’s so good. I can’t remember why, but for some reason they had to rewatch it recently, I think one of our friends hadn’t seen it.

Emily  20:08

Yes, we were quoting it, and she didn’t know what we were talking about. Had to pull up a video. And yeah,

Heidi  20:14

it’s so good. And then I die every time she says, like her shriveled little leg just a blanket over her strip with little legs, which, and if you have seen An Affair to Remember, you know that is not in the movie. But no, it’s not me. And then he goes to the door. The whole movie is great, but that scene is perfection.

Emily  20:42

This is a very niche extra credit, but if you haven’t watched Sleepless in Seattle recently, go watch it again, and you’ll appreciate this scene.

Heidi  20:51

And then you can watch You’ve Got Mail and just like When Harry Met Sally and have a whole migraine fall, yeah, never a bad idea.

Heidi  20:59

That is it for today’s episode. Reflect on how your dismissal routine is going with our guiding questions, clearly teach each procedure so your students can go through the steps automatically, and use our four tips to smooth out any bumps at the end of the day.