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End of the School Year: Flexible Planning

Featured Author:

Kate Olson

Kate Olson is a non-traditional new teacher, coming to the classroom after spending time as an accountant and a stay-at-home mother. She currently teaches Business Education in La Crosse, WI and is an online course developer and facilitator for teacher professional development at Professional Learning Board.

Her current educational passion is integrating new technologies into the classroom and enjoys sharing the exciting new tools she finds with her colleagues at school and in her online personal learning network. When she’s not glued to her laptop doing geeky things like wearing a headset and recording audio for her keyboarding blog, she can be found chasing a baby and toddler around the house, running, scrapbooking, and drinking gallons of coffee.

She blogs about her experiences in teaching and technology at Kate Says and blogs with her students at Keying In and Global Bloggers.

More articles from this author:

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1) Shake things up a bit – if you’re used to doing daily journaling in a notebook, try doing the journaling on a computer or even blogging with your students – adding technology to lessons isn’t difficult and it can really help with student engagement, especially at a time of year when attentions are drawn elsewhere

2) Have a cumulative project that is due very close to the end of the school year. Many teachers tend to wind down at the last month of school, but if the students know there work is leading up to something, they have more desire to keep working hard.

3) Teachers can keep their own morale up by staying organized and not letting the end-of-year craziness overwhelm them. Plan flexible lessons so that if field trips or other school activities interrupt your schedule you’ll be able to adapt. Try to get excited about preparing for the next year – any time spent doing this in the spring will make next fall that much easier! Also, all of your reflections about this year’s lessons are still fresh, so make notes of how you would adapt lessons for the future.

4) Most importantly, take advantage of the usually beautiful weather at the end of the school year and take your students outside! Plan lessons that can be conducted outdoors and students will be much more excited about the topic. A little fresh air and sunshine can do wonders for motivation!

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