‘Tis the season to get miserably ill at 3 AM with a stomach bug that you contracted from a 7 year old who openly coughed on your hand. Yuck.

We’ve all been there. Or, if you’ve been #blessed enough to avoid any surprise illnesses thus far, know that one day you will join our club, and you will need emergency sub plans in your life so your teammates/principal/bookkeeper/students/sub aren’t floundering around your room trying to figure out what you want the kids to do.

For some of you, your regular old plans for the week translate very well to a sub. Well, good for you! Mine do not. I write a series of bullet points to myself for each subject of what standard I’m hitting, notes about small groups, and some other random sticky notes. If you’re just soccer mom off the street, my lesson plans for myself will look like a different language. So, I always need to write sub plans. It’s worth it to keep the kids in the same rhythm and routine that they always have…it makes the sub’s life easier for that day, and makes my life easier when I return.

But, if I’m violently ill in the middle of the night, I’m not going to be able to remember what hour we have planning, let alone write out a full essay about how to do my small group routine. SO, emergency sub plans are a necessity. But, whenever I’ve tried purchasing emergency sub plans in the past…they were always missing something.

Sub Plans, Done For You

I think it’s easy to find K-2 “No Prep, Printable” sub plans. But more often than not, they only include Math and ELA worksheets, and they are covering too many grade levels to be really applicable to my 2nd graders. Plus, those sets don’t cover science, social studies, grammar, RTI…all of the other subjects I teach in a day. So, I’ve purchased those packs and still be left to scramble to fill the rest of my day.

After I wrote a blog post last year about prepping emergency sub plans ahead of time, the requests came rolling in for me to add content to my store that could be purchased alongside these planning templates. I have shied away from the idea for over a year, guys. There are so many variables, so many tweaks that need to be made for each classroom. Every time I tried to dive into making something that would work across the board of all 2nd grade classrooms, I ran into some reason why that may not actually work for everyone. So, I have started and stopped this project more times than I can count.

But y’all. I THINK I FINALLY CRACKED THE CODE.

Emergency sub plans that are completely done for you. And when I say completely done….I mean that you could theoretically email this PDF to your teammate, ask her to print it off for you, copy it and staple into packets for your students, and your sub could figure it out without any further help.

Let me show y’all what I mean (and keep reading to grab a FREE SAMPLE of these plans):

These plans are a packet full of activities that can last an entire day in a 2nd grade classroom. If all your sub had was a class set of these packets, he or she could manage…truly. The directions are clear. The activities are rigorous and standards-based. Everything is laid out simply and easily for your students to follow, making it easy on a sub of any kind.

My favorite feature is that there are two student packet versions: one that is on/above 2nd grade level, and one that is slightly below. If you have students approaching grade level, that can make sub plans even more challenging to write. But I’ve taken care of it all for you!

The content covered in this day’s worth of plans is: Morning Work, Literacy, Language Arts, Writing, Science, Social Studies, and Math. Paperless RTI plans are in the substitute guide for your sub to complete an RTI lesson on the fly if needed, but there are no materials for these lessons in student packets.

Student packets also include brain breaks and brain teasers. The brain breaks will help break up the monotony of sitting and working in a packet for most of the day, while the brain teasers are there for early finishers!

Don’t teach a certain subject? No worries! Skip printing that page and delete that box from the lesson plan page. Your sub will never know the difference!

The substitute guide has editable pages for roster, schedule, and school routines, as well as the pre-typed lesson plans, answer keys, and a note-taking page for the substitute to use. This guide also explains the different levels of packets, warns the sub about the brain breaks in the student packets so he/she can skip them at their own discretion, and talks them through any extra materials they may need. (This particular set requires that the sub has access to one picture book and one ruler…easy to get either in your room or a teammates’ room!)

This product will make your substitute sing your praises, and your students won’t lose a second of instructional time. It’s the product of my dreams. In my teaching career, I have:

woken up with stomach viruses, strep throat, and the flu.
I’ve gotten in a car accident on my way to school that totaled my car.
My mother in law passed away on a Tuesday night and I knew at 8 pm that I would be out the rest of the week.
My kids have woken up screaming and feverish at 4 am.

Knowing that this product existed would have saved me a lot of stress in moments where I needed to be focusing on myself or my family. It’s taken me over a year to make it, but now that it’s here, I hope it can give at least one teacher somewhere that peace of mind I craved so badly.