school work

Warning: My mom might be the only one interested in this post.

There are several reasons that I cannot use a typical lesson plan book when I plan my lessons.

1) I don't teach whole group lessons because each student comes to my room to work on individualized goals. (For example: 15 kids come to my room for reading, but I don't instruct all 15 of them at the same time because they range in ability from being able to read at a 4th grade level, to not being able to read anything but basic words.)

2) I have kids coming from different classrooms at different times.

3) I don't want to only record what I am directly instructing in small groups, but also what the other kids are doing and what the aides are doing.

4) Each kid has a different schedule due to therapies (like speech, OT and PT).

So, I have to make my own lesson plan formats and it can be very time consuming. I think I finally finished the outlines this week so now when it's time to plan a lesson, I can just go and fill in the boxes. Last year I managed to get each day on a front and back sheet of paper. This year, I have to have a different page for each day of the week for language arts and 2 pages for the week for math.

I took some screen shots to show examples of what these look like. I used Excel.

This is Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday math plans. You can see that on Tuesdays things get tricky because some kids come late and stay late, but they are not necessarily in the same math group due to abilities. (Oops. It should be shaded in where it says Special because they are not in my room.)

This is an example of 2 days of language arts. Some kids come for reading, some for writing and some or both and all from different classrooms. (3 days of the week, I can fit plans on 1 page. 2 days of the week I need 2 pages because it's an extended time period.) You can see how I can block out students if they will be gone for a therapy session or any other reason that may come up. I can change lines around depending on how I want to group kids that particular day.

This is Thursday and Friday math plans. It had extra space so I added in a section to remind myself of any materials I needed to gather ahead of time. Using that space requires me to plan a whole week at once. This has only happened in my dreams so far.

Figuring out these schedules is like trying to figure out a rubix cube. It often gives me a headache. When a regular ed. teacher says something to me like, "Oh I scheduled library for 1:30 on Thursday. Is it OK if my kids come with us for a half hour?" I tend to start shaking and sweating. They don't understand that it's just not as simple as that. But hopefully, with these spreadsheets, I can determine who is in my room and what they are doing at all times.