How to Plug-And-Play Your First Day of School Plans [episode 144]

Emily  0:37

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re making a streamlined plan for our first day of school and sharing a teacher approved tip for filling any downtime at the start of the school year.

Heidi  0:49

We start our episodes with a morning message just like we used to do a morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is what are your school contract hours? And we got lots of responses from our community.

Emily  1:02

Yeah, Mel has been on a 7:20 to 2:45 schedule, but this year her schedule is being shifted 15 minutes later and she is looking forward to that 15 minutes of extra sleep.

Heidi  1:14

15 minutes feels like a lot when it’s in the morning.

Emily  1:17

In Illinois, Nancy goes from 7:45 to 3:15. Stacey from Maryland goes the latest of anyone on our list. She starts at 9:00 but has to go until 4:30. Oh, that’s late. Laura and Erika go from 7:30 to 3:30 in North Carolina. Amy from Utah and Mary from Illinois go from 8:30 to 4:00. Officially, Tanya has a similar schedule. But she says that at the minimum she ends up working 7:30 to 4:30.

Heidi  1:46

That feels very relatable.

Emily  1:49

Pat from Ontario has the latest start of anyone on the list. She goes from 9:05 to 3:25.

Heidi  1:56

I think we started about 9:05 didn’t we?

Emily  1:59

I started earlier than you did.

Heidi  2:00

Oh, that’s right, cause you didn’t have buses?

Emily  2:02

Yep. Which is so funny because I didn’t my kids district now. All the elementary schools have the exact same start time. So it’s funny that in the district we used to teach in the school like the elementary schools all had slightly different random time. Yeah. In Illinois, Amy goes from 7:30 to 4:00 but has weekly staff meetings until 5:00 on Wednesdays.

Heidi  2:23

I’m glad I am not the only one with the long staff meetings once a week. But I hope Amy’s getting paid because I know they stopped paying us at 3:45. But if the meeting wasn’t over, we were still there sometimes till five, so.

Emily  2:34

Oh, for sure. Ours was fully after school hours. And we didn’t get paid for that time.

Heidi  2:40

Ridiculous.

Emily  2:42

But it is Elizabeth from Georgia who wins for longest contract time she goes from 6:55 to 3:00. That is long.

Heidi  2:49

That is way too long.

Emily  2:50

Yeah. I mean, I guess if you think about you would probably be that many hours there working anyway. So at least she’s getting paid for a longer stretch of hours. But I’d be curious to know how long the students are there of those hours. We’d love to hear about your contract hours join the conversation over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  3:10

Planning your first day of school can feel really tricky.

Heidi  3:13

There are just so many layers of complication that just add up to big headaches. First, you don’t know these kids, you’ve now got 20 to 30 little strangers who are coming out of three months of freedom, and they’re looking to you for what to do every minute of the day.

Emily  3:31

And unless you just wrapped up summer school, your teacher most likely needs some dusting off.

Heidi  3:36

And plus, at the beginning of the year, you don’t have the luxury of falling back on your daily routine to carry you through. Maybe it’s just me, but I just never realized how much I relied on my routine until it wasn’t there.

Emily  3:48

Oh yeah, I think that’s for sure the hardest part of a new school year. So not only do you not have a class routine yet, but you have all the work of planning and preparing your routine and getting all those kids used to following it.

Heidi  4:01

I’d say that teaching on the first day of school is a Herculean task. But let’s be honest, Hercules had an easy facing that lion, he would not have stood a chance with 25 six year olds who need to learn how to function in the cafeteria.

Emily  4:15

I’m terrified just thinking about that. He was smart to stick with the lion. Plus, he probably could take a bathroom break whenever he needed to.

Heidi  4:26

Endurance training your bladder is the real Herculean task of the first day of school.

Emily  4:30

So with all of those complications working against us, how do we have a successful, impactful and enjoyable first day of school without running ourselves ragged in the process?

Heidi  4:42

And the answer is we plan a successful, impactful and enjoyable first day of school.

Emily  4:48

Oh, perfect check. Job done. Good luck, everybody.

Heidi  4:53

Oh, don’t be silly. We could talk for hours about starting the school year.

Emily  4:58

And in fact, we have. If you look at our past episodes, I think we have talked for many, many hours about the first day of school.

Heidi  5:07

We did not know this when we started our podcast, but we are very passionate about back to school. Because we know how tough it is. Starting the school year was such a huge source of stress for us that we have worked really hard to help make it a little easier for other teachers.

Emily  5:22

And today we’re going to share our best tips and tricks for really streamlining your plans. So you can have that successful, impactful first day of school without needing a trip to the ER like one of us.

Heidi  5:34

Hey, I have only had to go to the ER once. Other few times were urgent care. And then the time after that was on the second day of school, so it all counts. Yeah.

Emily  5:46

We’re setting the bar at no trips to the doctor because of back to school stress. Okay, everybody, that’s the bare minimum. Our goal is that you can leave at the end of the first day feeling satisfied with how things went and ready to do it all again on day two.

Heidi  6:00

In order to do that, we want to make your first day plans as plug and play as possible.

Emily  6:06

If you’re not familiar plug and play means you take something out of the box, plug it in, and you’re ready to go. So how does that apply to our first day of school plans, Heidi?

Heidi  6:15

Well think of your first day schedule as your plug. Then we have our thoughtfully curated first day activities. We plug those activities into our schedule and our first day plans are ready to go. Unfortunately, it does take a little more effort than just opening a box. But with some scaffolding, it does not have to be difficult.

Emily  6:36

And in this case, the scaffolding we’re using to make these plans is our ATTABOY goals.

Heidi  6:42

ATTABOY stands for affirming, training, teaching and assessing at the beginning of the year. So we’re going to start by setting goals in each of those four areas, and then listing activities that will help us reach those goals.

Emily  6:56

For the first area affirming. My goal at the start of the year is that my students feel safe and welcomed and feel like they belong in our class. And to meet that goal, I’m going to plan activities that celebrate my students and help them get to know each other and me.

Heidi  7:12

If you’re like, Hey, that sounds great. But how am I keeping track of all of this? Don’t worry, we got you. We have a couple of resources that can help you out. We have goal sheets in our first day of school planning guide. And we have also included them in our ready for school checklists.

Emily  7:29

You can find the planning guide in our shop. And if you’re listening to this in July of 2024, you are in luck because our ready for school checklists are currently free. It’s our little gift to you our beloved podcast listeners. But get them quickly because that deal is only available for a limited time. And a few weeks we’ll be listing them in our shop as a paid product. So you can find links to both the Planning Guide and the ready for school checklist in our show notes.

Heidi  7:54

Any activities that you plan to help students get to know you get to know their classmates and get comfortable in the classroom, support your goal for affirming. Once you’ve listed your ideas, and if you want some more suggestions, go back to Episode 73, where we talk all about affirming. Move on to your other areas: training, teaching and assessing.

Emily  8:17

Your back to school activities for training will probably be something like teaching kids the morning routine, teaching them how to line up ,teaching them how to use glue without making a mess. There are just a few things to teach when it comes to procedures and routines.

Heidi  8:31

And by a few, we mean literally dozens of things. Again, we have got some resources to help you. Check out our procedures and routines planning guide and checklists. Start with the checklist. This walks you through the hundreds of possible procedures you might need in your class. And it helps you know which of those procedures can be covered by a quick conversation, and which might need a full lesson.

Emily  8:56

After listing your ideas for training you can turn to teaching and assessing. The only teaching I do the first day of school is how to do our morning work because I want them to come in on day two and know how to get started. It is that instructional routine that I am most desperate to get started as soon as possible.

Heidi  9:14

And for the first couple of days of school assessing is probably going to be very informal. It’s more like just keeping your eyes open to pay attention to who might be struggling with the academic content, or with social situations. And then in a few days, you can start giving all of those benchmark assessments that are waiting, so fun.

Emily  9:33

So now I’ve got my list of activities I want to include on the first day. But because filling downtime is really hard at the start of the year, we want to do what we can to avoid any unexpected downtime. In order to do that you need to plan for things to take a long time, but prepare like you’ll rush through everything.

Heidi  9:54

In our first day of school planning guide and in the ready for school checklists, we have a ton hind filler activity page. You only need one page, but we got it in both places. There are six categories of easy activities, books to read aloud movement, activity, songs, and so on. Fill out this list with as many ideas as you can think of.

Emily  10:15

You especially want activities that kids can do without you. So you can sit down for a second and catch your breath. Coloring your activity pages and short videos can be real lifesavers on the first day.

Heidi  10:27

Next to each activity, write an estimate for how long it will take. If you find yourself with five extra minutes, you want to be able to check your list for a five minute activity like teaching this on Toody-Ta and not be stuck showing five minutes of a 25 minute video.

Emily  10:42

Right. Okay, now we’ve got our list of things to do with our students. That’s the play part of our plug and play first day. So let’s plan our schedule. So we can plug in all these activities.

Heidi  10:55

So to plan your schedule, we’re going to start listing a timeline. We know when school starts and when it ends. And then we’re going to fill in our fixed events.

Emily  11:04

A fixed event is anything that has to happen at a certain time, think lunch, recess, specialty classes, you likely don’t get to control the timing of your fixed events.

Heidi  11:04

Add all your fixed events to your timeline. You can do this on a scrap of paper, maybe like I have done, but we have two versions of this in our first day of school planning guide. If you want to physically move your schedule around, you can cut and paste our little printable schedule maker. It’s very cute. But if you just want to do the same thing digitally, we also have it newly set up in Google Slides.

Emily  11:37

It’s so nice to be able to move the pieces around so you can see how everything comes together. A

Heidi  11:42

And if you just need to shift something easily, it’s just so easy to move it out of the way.

Heidi  11:46

Once your fixed events are in place, we can move on to our flexible events. Flexible events are whenever can happen at any time. But

Emily  11:55

But we want to start with the flexible events tied to our fixed events. I promise it isn’t as complicated as it sounds. If one of your fixed events is morning recess, what do your students need to know to be successful recessing?

Heidi  12:08

Let’s see, they’ll need to know how to get out to recess. How to get a drink and bathroom break. What are the options for recess activities? How to get recess equipment?

Emily  12:17

Well, I purposely didn’t let my kids take recess equipment the first day because I didn’t need one more procedure to teach.

Heidi  12:25

There a lot students need to know just to get out for recess. So before each fixed event plan a time to teach your students what needs to happen. We call these hinge events because the success of your fixed event hinges on what happens beforehand.

Emily  12:41

And depending on the age you teach at a hinge event might be a five minute discussion or a full 25 minute lesson.

Heidi  12:48

Especially when it comes to lunchtime. There are so many things that have to happen to make sure everyone is fed and where they need to be. On the first day tou could easily need 30 minutes or more to prepare everyone for lunch.

Emily  13:03

And that’s when your time filler activities come in handy. It’s hard to estimate how long a procedure lesson will take. Kids might get it quick or they might have a lot of questions. If you scheduled 30 minutes to go over lunch procedures but it only takes 20 you don’t have to sweat it, you can just pull something from your time filler list that will take 10 minutes.

Heidi  13:21

Definitely make sure you print off that list so you can reference it easily. You’ll tell yourself you’ll remember but you won’t. There’s too much to keep track of.

Heidi  13:29

Then once you have scheduled your teaching time before your fixed event, do the same thing post fixed event. Schedule a few minutes to review how lunchtime went, how recess went and discuss any issues that the kids had.

Emily  13:44

Once your regular routine is up and running, you probably won’t need to have a post fix event discussion. Unless your class is struggling to meet your expectations you don’t need to come in from lunch every day and ask how it went. But at the first of the year, the time is important for making sure everyone has all the information they need to be successful.

Heidi  14:03

Okay, now it is finally time to plug and play. Look over your ATTABOY activities and start plugging them into the schedule. Keep these three first day truths in mind. First, you need to know minute by minute how the day will unfold. Second, you need to over plan. And third, break up the talking.

Emily  14:24

That third one is especially important. Try not to teach two procedures back to back. It’s too much talking for you and your students will start to tune you out.

Heidi  14:34

Now on the first day, it might literally be impossible to completely avoid teaching two procedures in a row. But try to do what you can to keep it from happening. At the very least try to change locations between procedure lessons. So maybe do one at the carpet and then move back to desks to shake things up a little bit.

Emily  14:54

A good rule of thumb is to aim for a procedure activity pattern, teach a procedure do an activity, teach a procedure do an activity and voila, your schedule is complete.

Heidi  15:06

If you want to plug and play your first day schedule, start by setting your ATTABOY goals and gathering activities to help you meet each of those goals. Next, fill out a time filler activity page. So you’d have a plan for how to fill any awkward chunks of time that might crop up.

Emily  15:24

Then start on your schedule fill in your fixed events first. After that add time for a hinge event before and after each fixed event to teach students what they need to know. And the last step is to fill in the rest of your day with the activities from your ATTABOY goals.

Heidi  15:38

And look at that we’ve planned a successful, impactful and enjoyable first day of school and zero people went to the ER.

Emily  15:46

I mean fingers crossed, that’ll be a win for everyone.

Heidi  15:50

We would love to hear what activities you plan for the first day of school. Come tell us all about it in the teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  15:58

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 a video playlist. Tell us about this Heidi.

Heidi  16:12

Well one of the categories on your time filler activity sheet is videos. You could easily just make a list of video options on your sheet. But rather than have to fumble around finding the right video to fit the time you have available, you can simplify things by making a first day of school playlist. Of course you always have gold noodle at your fingertips. But if you are allowed to show YouTube videos, you can easily set up a first a playlist there and add to it videos you know your students will enjoy.

Heidi  16:41

Some of my favorites are scholastic storybook treasures I love there’s just so calming and engaging. And I liked that they have a variety of runtimes so you can choose the one that will best fit the time you have available. If you’ve got 15 minutes, they have 15 minute videos, if you’ve got six minutes, they have six minute videos. Now, I know these are mostly geared towards younger kids. But if you search around a little bit, you can find titles that you and your older students will enjoy.

Emily  17:08

I remember using my bonus points to buy a bunch of these sets of DVDs and I almost always showed the Meryl Streep Chrysanthemum one in the first couple days of school every year. I just loved it so much.

Heidi  17:23

Yeah, I had VHS because I had a VCR in my class. And the Kevin Hankies video was stellar.

Emily  17:29

Yes, I got a DVD player. It was like brand new in my classroom when I moved in like they had just gotten all the classrooms DVD player, but I did still have a VCR there too.

Emily  17:41

Vooks is another great resource for animated story books. And if you have Amazon Prime Vooks is apparently free to watch. And that’s Vooks with a V.

Heidi  17:50

Yeah, that’s part of your Prime membership. Amazon is a great option for hosting your back to school playlist. Now, it is not as easy to set up playlists on Amazon as it is on YouTube. So you’d probably have to create a profile for your class, and then you can add videos to the watch list on that profile.

Heidi  18:09

Besides storybooks, you probably want to get some up and moving videos. If you’ve got 30 minutes or so adventure to fitness is a lot of fun. You can find those on YouTube and we will put a link to those in our show notes.

Emily  18:20

As you’re putting together your playlist aim for a variety of video lengths and a variety of video styles. That way you’re prepared to feel any unexpected moments of downtime.

Heidi  18:30

And come share your suggestions for videos with the other teachers in the teacher approved Facebook group so that we can all get some new ideas for our playlists.

Heidi  18:39

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

Emily  18:44

I’m giving extra credit to the TV series Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+. I know we’ve mentioned in a previous episode that a lot of people who loved the Percy Jackson books hated the Percy Jackson movie.

Heidi  18:57

Yeah, it wasn’t good.

Emily  18:58

But I think the TV show holds up really well. I just finished the first book recently and started the series. We all love it. I’m I’m interested in it. And they’ve made some changes. But I feel like the changes they made were good. The books a little data is starting to become a little bit.

Emily  19:14

So the movie has made some updates that I think work really well. So it’s always fun to read a book before watching the show or movie that it’s based on. But I think this will be a great watch even if you haven’t read the books.

Heidi  19:25

So nice to hear because sometimes Disney gets it so wrong with book adaptation.

Emily  19:29

Oh yeah. Where are you giving extra credit to you Heidi?

Heidi  19:33

Okay, I’m giving extra credit to kids in the summer. So just right now there are three little girls in the yard behind my they’re wearing Halloween costumes and jumping on the trampoline. It’s just this perfect little picture of summer. I have got a path of footprints down my hall when Emily’s youngest was over recently, and she’s been barefoot outside all day. So I’ve just got these little footprints. I know I should clean them. up, but they make me smile when I see them.

Heidi  20:02

And, you know, we live in a neighborhood that has a ton of kids. So we’ve got lemonade stands on every corner, and they all have little popsicle stain faces. Exactly what summer should be. I’m drinking it up. Especially because I don’t have any responsibility to care for any of those little barefoot popsicle eater.

Emily  20:19

So lucky for you, it’s very sticky.

Heidi  20:22

I can just enjoy the beauty of their childhoods from a sticky free distance.

Emily  20:29

We do have kind of an idyllic neighborhood for childhood summer, though. There’s just kids running around all the time. And it doesn’t hurt that this week the temperatures are a lot better than they were recently. Oh my gosh. Fully it lasted.

Heidi  20:43

Yeah, summer, real highs and real lows on that.

Emily  20:46

For sure.

Heidi  20:48

That’s it for today’s episode. Plug and play your first day of school by gathering ideas for meaningful activities, and planning an intentional daily schedule. And remember our teacher approved tip for making a start of the year video playlist.

Emily  21:01

And if you haven’t yet come sign up for our waitlist for our brand new back to school course BTS success. You can sign up for that at secondstorywindow.net/waitlist.