1. Take the time to plan out your day
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed in the classroom, especially at the start of a new term. Tests and exams looming, the general chaos of teaching – it’s a lot to keep up with.
Thinking ahead is the best weapon in your arsenal to ensure you are well-prepared and supporting your students fully at every stage. With our teacher planner, you can use timetables and day-by-day planning to break your day up into manageable chunks, like marking, lesson planning, and meetings. This allows you to make daily goals and monitor your progress. You get the peace of mind of knowing exactly what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. Our teacher planner also lets you go one step further with our year planner section – add important dates at the start of the year and update throughout so that nothing is forgotten.
2. Record valuable notes before and after parents' evening
Open communication between a parent and their child’s teacher is so important. That’s why parents' evening is such a great opportunity. It’s your chance to discuss successes, ask and answer questions, and work together to keep children engaged and happy. With 30-odd children in your class, you don’t want to let anyone slip through the cracks. Our parents' evening notes section lets you keep up-to-date on each student. This helps you to tackle ongoing issues and provides a good record to look back on at the end of the year and reflect.
3. Keep phone numbers to further enable communication
Parents' evening is invaluable, but it isn’t always an option. With busy lives and clashing schedules, phone calls are a convenient way to maintain a dialogue with parents all throughout the year. You don’t know when an issue will arise from day to day, whether it’s a problem with behaviour or attendance, or just the need for a general chat. At the start of the new year, take the time to fill in the dedicated telephone and address section in our teacher planners. That way, you know exactly how to contact parents whenever you need to.
4. Make notes at staff meetings
Whether you like them or not, staff meetings can make such a difference. They give you a chance to not only foster a team spirit amongst staff, but also to streamline and improve the classroom experience for your children. You can address ongoing issues, share new ideas, and ensure that you’re all working successfully towards a shared goal. So don’t let those updates or suggestions slip your mind – use our staff meetings section to prepare points you want to discuss before or record important takeaways after.
5. Keep an updated index of resources
As a teacher, you probably have a whole library of resources you use regularly. Worksheets, revision guides, teaching ideas, interactive lessons – they’re all so useful to have on hand. Keep them all in one place in our dedicated index of resources. By having them easily accessible at the very start of the year, they’re readily available to use and share with students whenever you need them!
If your New Year's resolution is to further support yourself and your students, there’s no one better placed to help than our team at EPSL. With almost 50 years spent providing tools for productive and organised classrooms, we know how much of a difference quality resources make to a school. From personalised exercise books to reading records and homework diaries, we’re here to help – visit our website or reach out on 01254 686 500 today and we’ll get you started!
