5 Things To Do Before Summer Break that You’ll Thank Yourself for Next School Year

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Hey there, teacher friends. Welcome to another exciting episode of the podcast. Today we’re diving into a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, getting ready for the upcoming school year. And here’s the tip. We’re gonna do it before this year ends or before you leave the school. So that’s why it makes it super.

Great and exciting because the beginning of the school year is exciting in and of itself, but it tends to be pretty stressful. If there’s things that you can do right now, then that would be best. In this episode, we’ll be exploring five essential tasks that multiple prep. Secondary teachers should tackle before summer break.

Trust me, you’ll thank yourself when the next school year rolls around.  Welcome to the Secondary Teacher Podcast, the podcast for middle and high school teachers juggling multiple preps to get the strategies to reduce. Overwhelm so that you don’t have to choose between being an effective teacher and prioritizing important relationships.

I’m your host, Khristen Massic, a 10-year high school engineering teacher, former middle school assistant principal and teacher coach. Every week we will discuss strategies, systems, and time-saving tips to help you not only survive but thrive as a multiple prep teacher. I feel like I’m living on the edge today because I am recording during the daylight hours and hopefully.

My children don’t disturb this recording. Let’s quickly go over those five things to do before summer break and then I will elaborate more on them. The first is going to be to calendar out your units for next year. The second is update your disclosure documents or your syllabi. Third, complete an inventory and and order any new materials.

Supplies, equipment, anything like that that you might need for next year. The fourth is plan out your first week of school, and the fifth is make any copies or anything that you will need for that first week back. Let’s go a little bit deeper into each one of those. We’re going to start with calendaring out your units for next year.

This is one of my favorite things to do. Before school ends because it really can free up your summers. Although if summer has already started for you, then go ahead. This is something to get done at the beginning of the summer so that you don’t have to worry about it for next year. And one of the resources that I have for you is the plan out your course blueprint and it will actually give you some. Templates and other things that you can use to help make this process easier. But essentially what you’re going to be doing is you’re going to look at your school calendar or your district calendar. In conjunction with your scope and sequence or your standards, and figure out how long you are going to spend on each unit and when those units are going to be occurring in conjunction with the calendar and breaks and any other things that are happening during the school year.

If you already have your scope and sequence for next year, this is an easy adjustment. You’re just lining it up with the calendar from. Next school year, if you’re also reflecting on. The previous school year, look to see where you had additional time or where you may have run out of time so that you can adjust your scope and sequence to really fit those days and that amount of time that you will need for next year.

And my recommendation is to do this for. Every single prep that you have, that way you go into the summer already having an idea of what is going to be happening throughout the entire school year. And yes, you will probably have to adjust things here and there, but for the most part, you will know where you’re going and that will make your whole school year much simpler and less stressful.

The next thing you can do is while you are cleaning up your space, you can complete an inventory of what you currently have so that you know what.

You can order as far as equipment, materials, supplies. Really keep track of what is working, what’s not working, what needs to be thrown away, what needs to be reordered, because I don’t know about you, but I have started the beginning of the school year with. Out some equipment and supplies while I’m waiting for things to be ordered or things to arrive, and it makes it really stressful because I’ve had to change entire units.

For example, when I first started teaching at my second school, I was teaching a computer technology class, and then I was also teaching a robotics class, neither of which had equipment. My classroom was still under construction, I didn’t even have computers. It was super stressful for that first term.

Yes, an entire term I didn’t have anything for, I had to really rethink and revamp everything that I was doing to keep my students engaged and try to find something that I could teach them without that equipment. Now that wasn’t because we waited too long to order things. I actually decided to move to that school in the summer.

But if you can prevent that from happening, it will save you a ton of stress and overwhelm and really needing to rethink your scope and sequence to deal with something that could have been preventable and depending on your school. Take a look and see if there is a way to order classroom supplies from the school prior to leaving, because that’s also really nice to have ready in your room when you arrive back, and if you are needing to ask for equipment and supplies for your classroom that you don’t have the funding for, which I really hope is not the case, this is also a good time to put together a wishlist that you can send to.

Your Facebook group or your Instagram group, perhaps using something like donors choose so that you can have this runway to get that equipment, those supplies, those materials, whatever you need for the following school year.

The next thing that you can do right now is to update your disclosure documents and your syllabi. Typically, this is something that we wait and do at the beginning of the school year because that’s one of those first days of school things, but you can get it done now. There’s no sense. To wait all the way until the end of the summer or once you go back to school to get this done.

Because more likely than not, you just need to make some simple adjustments. When you are adjusting your syllabus or your disclosure document, make sure that you look at your routines. If there’s anything that needs to be updated that way, that’s usually the crucial information to let your students and parents know if they’re.

Is going to be anything that is going to change from your class or things that might need to be adjusted to address things that had happened this previous school year.

The next item is plan out your first week of back to school. This will go hand in hand with your disclosure document updating because you are going to be thinking about your first week back and what do you need to be doing during that first week?

What do you want students to be doing? This is a great time to. Put together lesson plans that have to do with your routines and your procedures. How are you going to teach that? Think about what’s working in your classroom now, what you want to tweak, and that will really help you. First off, remember by doing it right now, it’ll be fresh on your mind, what worked, what didn’t work, versus waiting for the entire summer to try to remember, and you kind of might be in a little bit of a honeymoon state and you.

Miss, remember what the previous school year was like. This is also a time for you to gather. Introduction activities to your different classes. Are you going to do things with careers, career, career exploration? Are you going to be doing some icebreakers and what could that look like? I do like to think about this first week of school during the summer and trying to insert things along the way, but if you have that basic idea, that basic plan of what you would like to do, then you know what you are missing over the summer.

What? Ideas that you would like to generate over the summer, because for the most part, you have everything planned and you can just generate that idea, whether it’s an icebreaker or some sort of career activity. And then you can insert that once school begins or once you return back to school. And then my final advice, Of something to do for this end of the school year to get you ready for next year is going to be to then make any copies for the first week back.

You might have a district copy center. We have something like that here, which is great. If we have all of our resources ready, we can send it to them and they’ll do it over the summer. You might have some paras or some office staff who works over the summer that. Could have need something to do.

You could give something like that to them, or you could make the copies yourself. The last thing you wanna be doing is those first few days back is instead of getting your classroom ready or getting other things ready for the school year, is you sitting by the copy machine or waiting in line at the copy machine to make all of your copies.

Because you already have your disclosure document planned out, get that approved so you can get it printed, and then whatever you’re doing for the first. Days of school, the first week of school. If there are any materials that you need to print, then you can do that as well, and then you can store it in a nice little box somewhere in your classroom knowing that it is all ready to go and you don’t need to worry about it or stress about it over the summer.

There you have it. My CTE teacher, multiple prep teacher, secondary teacher friends, five crucial tasks to tackle before some break. That will set you up for an amazing school year ahead. We are going to be doing more of these types of episodes throughout the summer, so make sure that you. Tune in, and by planning, prepping, updating, organizing.

Now you’ll be thinking yourself when the chaos of the new school year begins. If you found this episode helpful, it could be for others, so make sure you share it with your teacher bestie, or post it as a screenshot on Instagram and tag me at Khristen maik, K H R I S T E N M A S S I C. Until next week.

Until next week.