How Teachers Can Plan Lessons The Week Before a Holiday Break [episode 36]

Hey, there, thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re discussing how to plan your teaching in the days before a school break.

We start our episodes with a morning message just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is what’s something they didn’t teach us in college that they definitely should have? Emily, what do you think? How to repair a copy machine. Oh, that would have come in so handy. Cuz you’re gonna be doing that a lot. How about you? I think how to endurance train your bladder because it is an art. And you will need it, but one we wish we didn’t. We have some responses from our community. Lauren said how to actually teach kids how to read ie phonics. I did so much research, digging and learning when I started in first grade, to learn as much as I could about how to teach them. Yeah, that would have been useful for me too. Lea said, how to talk to parents throughout the year to welcome them, approach them when things don’t go well, talk about all the positives, etc. That’s a good point. Maybe we need to do a podcast on that one. I think so. Calvin said classroom management. It’s great when preparing for a school year, but it sort of goes sour when you actually get into the school year. It’s a pain the kids show up and ruin all your good plan. Sharica said the importance of building relationships, not just community, who are your students? And how do they function? What do they really care about outside of school? Love that. Yeah. We’d love to hear your response to this and other questions over in our teacher approved Facebook group, or on Instagram at @2ndstorywindow and that’s with the two.

Let’s talk about this week’s resource of the week: our Thanksgiving fluency in a flash mini lessons. Fluency in a flash is a digital resource we designed to help teachers practice reading fluency skills every day with no prep needed. All you do is open up the PowerPoint, click on the day and do the activity which takes about five to 10 minutes. While we have everyday versions of fluency and flash, today, we’re highlighting the delightful Thanksgiving version we created. It contains two weeks worth of digital mini lessons.

Heidi, why don’t you tell us about the fluency activities and what they look like each day. I would love to because I love this resource. It is so much fun. So each day of the week has a different type of activity. On Monday, the activity is syllable segments. So students work with multi syllable words, to practice the word attack strategies of segmenting and blending. And the syllables slide in on pumpkins before Thanksgiving parade floats, and then they reveal the whole word. It’s so cute. And the words are tailored for the difficulty of the students. So first grade and fourth grade have very different words. So yes, an activity might be like they see the syllable cran bear Re and then they blend the whole word cranberry.

On Tuesday, they have the activity of what a character so students practice reading a short seasonal poem as a real life opportunity to practice good phrasing and expression without poetry. But then they also have the opportunity to make the practice extra fun by reading as different seasonal characters like a football coach or jerky. The students love that it’s in it’s so fun to watch them do it. I love it.

On Wednesday, we have watch your tone where students practice reading the same sentence using tones that match different settings. That sounds a little complicated, but I promise it’s not. This helps students focus on the subtler aspects of expressive reading. So I’ll be gone like the wind takes on a really different meaning if it said by a turkey hiding on Thanksgiving Day, versus a player in a football game. Love it.

Thursday, we have crazy conversations where students create a conversation where the words are total nonsense, but they use the punctuation cues to add meaning to what they’re saying. So even though the words don’t make sense, somehow, the dialect comes out a little bit making. It sounds like a conversation. That’s the goal. Students will love having a nonsense word conversation between a boy and his grandma at the Thanksgiving table and between a football fan and a referee. So Emily, can you help me with an example? So, plates, feast feast Turkey, Turkey Turkey. It sounds like so ridiculous, but they get such a kick out of it. And they really are building good fluency skills there.

And then we love to do something fun on Fridays. So with this resource, we have riddles. Fluency and inferencing skills are applied as students practice reading, and then solving seasonal riddles. Students love riddles, you know that, but spoiler alert, they’ll get a real kick out of the background on this one. The activity is set during a turkey football game as in the turkeys are playing football. I love it so much, and the riddles are fun too; can’t overlook that. Yes, this is one of the most fun resources we’ve ever created. And we hear over and over again that the students beg to do it every day. You can find our Thanksgiving Fluency in a Flash for grades first through fourth grade at the link in our show notes.

We are in that time of year when the school calendar starts to look a little Swiss cheesy. There are long holiday breaks, there are 4-day weeks, there are three day weeks, and potentially there are several days of early dismissal. Honestly, you might not have a week of five uninterrupted school days, between now and mid January, that can be so exhausting. I really hate when my schedule is disrupted. So how do you plan for such a Swiss cheese schedule? We’re going to call it that because I think it’s the perfect description. That’s what we’re going to help you with today.

So a short week often adds a lot of anticipation to the air. Maybe you’ve noticed this with your students. And that can make it tricky to engage them if they’re tipping into overwhelm. You have probably heard us talk about student engagement before we dedicated episode 35 to breaking down our model of engagement if you want to hear more. I loved that episode so much.

You use such a good analogy about student engagement in that episode. Why don’t you tell us about it again, don’t mind if I do. So imagine for a minute that student engagement is an old timey balance scale with the buckets on each end. One bucket is novelty and the other bucket is routine. In the middle when routine and novelty are more or less equal, our students are engaged. So we benefit by doing whatever we can to keep our classrooms balanced between routine and novelty. And what a surprise that teaching is a big balancing act all the time. If the engagement scale tips too far to the novelty side, kids are overwhelmed. If the scale tips too much to the routine side, kids are bored. And kids that are either bored or overwhelmed, can’t learn and truly they are likely causing problems. Oh, you know they are. That scale visual makes it so easy to imagine what’s happening with student engagement.

As we approach a big holiday or school vacation, student excitement starts to ramp up. Oh, yes, surprise coins are pouring straight into that novelty bucket without any help from us. So we have to balance all that novelty by adding predictability coins to the routine bucket. But it’s so hard to lean on predictability if you’re stuck with the unpredictability of a three day or even a two day week, right?

So a good place to start is just ask yourself, how normal do you want your abnormal week to be? Do you have regular content that you need to cover? In my year outline because there are so many four day weeks in the year, I just always counted weeks with four or more days as regular weeks. That meant to stay on track. I had math lessons to teach, stories to read, and science units to cover. I’d mostly stick to the regular weekly routine and then just shift activities a day earlier or a day later, depending on which day of the week we had off. Yeah, a four day week doesn’t require too much adjustment, but you need a different approach for 3-day weeks. And that’s why I didn’t count any week with fewer than four days as a regular week in my yearly outline. So for 3 day weeks, I tried to follow our normal daily routines. But maybe instead of starting a new math unit or weekly story, I just use those times to catch up or review. And usually had a two day week, the week of Thanksgiving. And honestly, that was just mostly filling time because what do you even do with two days?

I know, you mentioned an important point, though about not teaching new lessons on a three day week. A lot of people travel on short weeks. So you don’t want to be launching a new unit when you potentially have a lot of absent kids. You’d also want to avoid any kind of assessment before a break. I actually just saw a blog post where a teacher recommended giving tests on short weeks. But I think that’s the wrong approach and I’m guessing you agree with me Emily? Yes I do. Giving assessments on a short week is just creating more work for the teacher. First you will have to retest the kids that are absent and that is such a pain. And second, the kids that are in attendance aren’t going to be giving you their best work. So I would say to just avoid tests before holiday breaks. Yeah.

So how do we want to structure our Swiss cheese weeks? I love that name. There are a variety of options that range from stick to the established routine on one end of the spectrum, to throw it all out the window and party on the other. Probably the easiest way to cope with a short week is to make as few adjustments as possible to your regular school day. That makes planning and management much simpler. Plus, it allows you to counteract all the novelty by leaning hard on the predictability of your routine. I definitely feel like that’s the way I typically leaned. I love a routine What can I say. But if you’re behind schedule short weeks can help you catch up. Maybe you need to teach a morning and afternoon math lesson. Maybe you go all in on phonics for a couple days. A short we can give you a great boost to get back on track. A variation on catching up is to follow your regular routine. But instead of the normal lessons you would teach you use that time for review and practice. Maybe you get up the math games you’ve learned this year and your kids rotate through games during math time. You could plan a Science Review Kahoot or plickers activity. And teachers always need more time for review. And short weeks really lend themselves to review activities. Oh, we love a review.

As a teacher, I loved to use short weeks to added seasonal activities that I normally didn’t feel I had time for. And there are several ways to work in themed fun without losing too many of your predictability coins. The easiest way is to just follow your regular schedule, but add in an unexpected activity where you’d normally be teaching content. Maybe you don’t want to do your properties of rocks lesson on a day when five of your students are absent. Instead, you could do a holiday craft during that time. One thing I like to do was add in what I called festive breaks. I just made that up. Yeah. They were easy to plan and they didn’t create too many disruptions. But they added a little sparkle to the day. So the day before Thanksgiving break, for example, I would just post a bunch of dye cat paper turkeys on the board. And on the back of each turkey was a short activity included simple things like read a story, play a game or color a Thanksgiving picture. And then during work time I’d set a timer depending on the activity might be 10 minutes or 20 minutes. And when the timer beeps, I choose a student to pick a turkey and we do the activity and then just get right back to what we were doing. Festive breaks are a way to add seasonal fun without adding to the overwhelm. I think we should start calling them festive breaks because we should trademark that I really like it. If you want some ideas for your festive breaks, we have nine sets of seasonal brain breaks in each set has 60 activities that will give you a ton of easy to implement ideas to pull from for your festive break planning.

If you want something more festive than just a break, you could follow your daily schedule and make some or all of your activities seasonal. Just be aware that the more seasonal activities you add to your day, the more surprised coins you drop into the novelty bucket. If your class easily tips into overwhelm, you might want to use a light hand when it comes to seasonal activities. And only do one or even maybe two a day. I think we’ve all had classes like that who easily tip into overwhelm. A lot of your planning on a short week really comes down to knowing your students and how they handle disruption. So if your class can manage a large amount of surprise, you could have a routine morning. And then just use the afternoon for funsies on activities. You could also switch it and have a fun morning and try to have a normal afternoon. But that’s gonna come with a whole host of management issues. I cannot even fathom that. But if you work it out, let us know. Or if you want, you could just lean into the craziness and commit to a whole theme day. We love themed days at the end of the school year, but they also can be a lot of fun before a holiday break. In episode eight the secret to end of your survival, we break down everything to know about themed days. Or maybe you just want to toss all routine out the window and go with a class party. If that’s the case, we have two podcast episodes that can help you there. Episodes 33 and 34 walk you through every step of how to plan an enjoyable but not crazy class party. Yeah, we don’t do crazy No, no, that should be our it’s our our tagline to our podcast. We don’t do crazy.

Once you’ve decided to what degree you want to stick to your regular schedule, you’ll need to find activities to fill those hours. We already mentioned catching up on content or reviewing what you’ve already taught. You can also use the Swiss cheese weeks to review your procedures. If you didn’t have time to do Guided Discovery on all your materials at beginning of the year, you can schedule some time for it now. My go to on any day that was wildly different than our regular schedule was to have a themed work packet. I know, I’m a wild and crazy teacher with my themed work pack that holds you back. And I would work packets to because over the course of the day, they buy me 60 to 90 minutes of quiet work time, didn’t do it all in one chunk. Because, you know, they’re still kids. Yes. But over the course of a day, you could get a fair amount of time out of that. It’s also important to note that kids love work packets, too, I promise. I think part of the appeal was that I let them work on their pages in any order. So that gave them a sense of you know, freedom and choice. And also, although I chose mostly math and language arts practice, I would throw in a few just for fun pages. A seasonal word search does wonders to turn a task into a game. Yes, they were always really excited about these work packets.

And here’s a hot tip for work packets. Once I picked the activity pages, I reduced them to 50%. And then I copied them with two worksheets on each side of the page. So that meant on a single sheet of paper I could fit four activities. So I’d put together three or four pages, and that gives me 12 to 16 activities. And my second graders had no problem completing the activities, even though they were smaller than normal. Yeah, you can’t go wrong with a work packet.

If you want to lighten the load on your planning, you could schedule rotations with other classes on your grade level, and have an afternoon of several rotations. Or you could do one rotation a day for every day in your short week. Or I guess you could do both if you really like rotation, go rotations crazy if you want. Short weeks also really lend themselves to trying things out. If there’s an idea you’ve thought about implementing, you can test it out on a short week before fully committing. Or you can do the things you always wish you had time for like building classroom community, or implementing a service learning project. You could also try out activities that extend longer than the time that you normally have available for a lesson. Maybe this is your moment to try a big STEM exploration or give some extra PE time to learning yoga or dance. Yes, take this time to be the teacher you wish you had time to be the rest of the year. Read the picture books do the art projects. And if your admin gives you grief you send them our way. But email Heidi. As a bookworm I always loved to my teachers let us have readathons; we’d bring pillows and blankets and get to spend a couple hours reading. And that was my idea of heaven. I’ve loved that would be such fond memories. But I had very few readathons as a teacher because it didn’t feel like there was time.

I wish I had taken better advantage of the short weeks to add in the sorts of things that make school memorable. Yes, I always did a read a thon on that short day before Christmas break. And I felt like that was such a good such a good last day before the break really fun memories. So our advice is to schedule time for the things that you enjoy most as a teacher but can’t normally fit in, you have our permission to lean into it.

Another option is to use the short weeks as a chance to get ahead. When I taught second grade, I tended to view these weeks as just time to fill so that we could get back to our regular schedule because like Emily asked the love routine. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to switch my perspective. Instead of just filling time, I could have been buying myself sometime. Yeah. Are you going to need work projects or hallway displays for an upcoming parent conference? Doing them now and tuck them away for later? Do you have a tricky math concept coming up? Maybe you could teach a game to help prep your students for it. Or maybe you ran out of time to teach measurement every year. I’m not speaking from experience there at all. You could just tuck some fun measurement activities into the short weeks. Yeah, or maybe the classroom clutter is just starting to be too much. So you could use an afternoon for a big classroom reset, clean up the desks, throw out dry glue sticks, reorganize your stash of rainy day games. Doing those things now is a gift to your future self. That’s something we’ve talked about before and you will thank yourself later if you make the time to do those things now that get you ahead. So as you look ahead at your swiss cheese schedule with holes for missing days, think about what you can do now for your future self.

Regardless of how you plan to fail your short weeks. It’s important to maintain your regular standards of behavior. Oh yeah, because the short weeks can feel so loosey goosey. There’s a strong temptation to lighten up on your procedures and expectations, but that approach is going to backfire on you. There’s so much novelty going on, kids are counting on us to help keep them balanced with routine. If you lighten your expectations because it feels like a celebratory thing to do, you run the risk of tipping things from the fun of novelty into the chaos of overwhelm. No, we don’t want that. It can be a fine line to walk. But remind yourself that you are not being a wet blanket. I say that to myself in the mirror. So really adding predictability coins to the routine bucket is helping your kids enjoy themselves, because you’re preventing them from getting out of control and overwhelmed. Short weeks are tricky enough without student behavior becoming a problem.

So as we head into the Swiss cheese weeks, start by identifying how much regular content you need to cover, and then decide how much you want to lean into your predictable routine, and how much novelty you want to introduce. Just remember that even if you have a party atmosphere, it’s important not to lighten up on your behavior expectations. Let us know how you decide to tackle your swiss cheese weeks, we’d love to hear about it over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

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 plan student independent work time, so the teacher can have some independent work time too. Heidi tell us about this. So as you are planning your short weeks, do yourself a huge favor and schedule in independent work time for your students every day, you can really pack a lot of prep into 30 minute time slots. And this gives you a chance to get prepared to return to your regular routine. Maybe you want to start taking down some holiday decorations on the sly or start planning your lessons for next week. Intentionally creating a buffer of work time means that you get to enjoy your weekend or holiday break without having to stress about getting ready for next Monday.

Now the challenging part is keeping the kids occupied. You need something they can do independently for at least 30 minutes once or twice a day. I know we’ve already mentioned it, but a theme work packet can be a real friend here. You can even get stuff done while kids are rotating through math games, or doing 30 minutes of silent reading. Don’t feel like you need to be working with small groups on a short week. Use this time to prepare for next week small groups. So be intentional about planning student work time on your short weeks, so that the teacher can get some work time too.

To wrap up the show. We are sharing what we are giving extra credit to this week. This week, we’ve got a special joint extra credit. So Heidi, why don’t you share that with us? We want to give extra credit to you our listeners. You are an awesome teacher. I may not know you, so how do I know of your absolute awesomeness? It’s because you care enough about your job to spend your own time listening to a teaching podcast. This won’t help you earn any more money or get you a promotion. You just do it because your kids matter to you. We also know how awesome you are because she just referred to the strangers you’re paid to teach as your kids and you didn’t even bat an eye. These little humans who fill your desks every day are your kids. And 20 years from now when you run into one of them at a football game, they will still be one of your kids.

And if you are like me, as soon as anyone offers praise, I just default to thinking of all the ways that I’m actually falling short. But I just want to remind you that you are already doing the most important job of just loving your kids. Recently, my friend Christie passed away and I had the good fortune of getting to teach with her for several years. I think the only way to describe Christie is delightful she was just delightful in every way. Even when she was running around crazy trying to get everything set up for the sixth grade graduation, she had a smile to go along with her eye rolling. She kept it real. As I’ve read the tributes that have been pouring in for her I have been most touched by the ones from her former students. Even kids who didn’t have her as a teacher have shared how her classroom was a welcoming place for them to hang out when school didn’t feel very welcoming. We all love our kids in different ways and it is so easy to get caught up in all the ways that we are not like other teachers, but you are doing the important work. You’re loving your kids the way that only you can. And long long after they have forgotten anything you’ve ever taught them, they will always remember that you love them. So all the extra credit to you our very favorite listener. Yes you you’re the best one.

That’s it for today’s episode. Use our tips to help you survive the week before any break and be sure to check out our Thanksgiving Fluency in a Flash.