Hey everyone! I’ve been busy on my BA2 block placement, teaching in a Year 1 class so I thought I’d share my experiences to help you on your placement. I shared my overall view about my first placement last year and I thought that I’d share some of my new tips and tricks that have been making life easier on placement.
Create a weekly to-do list (on paper):
If you’ve been following my blog for a while you’ll know what I use google calendar to keep me organised but most schools have a ‘no mobiles’ policy so I had to find an alternative solution to writing my to-do lists. This was the perfect solution! I write down that I have to do every morning before the children arrive (for example, lesson preparation), things I need to during the school day (such as marking books or photocopying) and things I need to do once I’m home (such as planning). Once I have completed a job I highlight it and if I don’t complete it, I simply write it in the next days row.
Order school meals
Last year I managed to make all of my lunches the night before school but that sometimes meant I ate a pot noodle for lunch. This year I decided to cut out the night-time stress by simply paying for lunches at school. You can get a decent 2-course meal for £2/3 and have extra time during the evening to do your own thing. It may be more expensive but I’d rather have more time and feel less stressed.
Sleep with your blinds open
Sleeping with my blinds open has helped me get up so much easier. I like to sleep in complete darkness so I use an eye mask but as soon as my alarm goes off I take it off. This wakes me up quickly, ready for the day ahead.
Create weekly planning, not single lesson planning
Creating weekly planning has reduced the length of my lesson plans by almost a half! I now put all of the information I need for the whole week at the start of my planning and use treasury tags to add the planning to the week’s document. I also use weekly cover pages (like above) to help to find planning a little bit easier in my file.
Bulk buy & batch cook
Bulk buying and cooking has been a brilliant help on placement. My incredible boyfriend mostly cooks for me during the week but to make things easier he’s been making 4 portions instead of 2 and freezing the rest. Also, due to the amount of time spent lesson planning, finding time to go shopping is difficult. So every fortnight we would go to Aldi and stock up on 2 weeks worth of food. We meal plan before we go shopping so we know how much and what food to buy.
I hope you found this post useful! Let me know if you have any questions about my teaching placement below.
Izzy's Adventures 