Teaching Tuesday

When my doctor advised me to stop working a week earlier than I was planning on it's safe to say I panicked! She didn't understand and said, "Most people are thrilled to stop working." Well, all you teachers out there know what not going to work means...LESSON PLANS!

All I could think about was an extra week of lesson plans I would be responsible for writing. Now, I should be able to quickly write out plans after 10 years of teaching; however, I am not! I try very hard to write plans for visiting teachers so that my class runs as close to "normal" as possible when I'm not there. And I am a little bit controlling, so releasing my class over to someone else is not an easy thing for me to do! So, needless to say it takes me FOREVER to write plans. I do use a template for each day of the week, which includes specific daily schedules. This does make it a little easier but it is still a very time consuming task for me.

Here's what I did: I made a folder for every day of the week that included detailed plans, charts, copies of homework, texts to read and anything else that was needed for the day. I also created a binder of important classroom/school information and a lesson plan book that contained all lessons that should be covered for the rest of the year. (Pictures below.)

I was tempted to just whip together some basic plans but I couldn't. I needed to give her a good idea of how a full week in our classroom flows. Does anyone else have these problems with writing lesson plans? What type of plans did you write for long term substitutes? Any good tips or pictures of your planning?