Maternity Leave as a Teacher | How to Get Organized!
It’s hard for me to believe that this sentence is even true, but I just had my fourth baby.
I’m a second grade teacher, and I just had my FOURTH baby.
Who does that??? Hahah.
He’s the most precious, perfect angel of a baby and I’m completely in love with him. But, even though this was my fourth time doing this, getting ready for his arrival was no easier than with any other baby.
Specfically: getting my classroom ready was just as hard as it has ever been. There is SO much to do to get your classroom ready for a maternity leave. So, today I have the freshest tips to share with you all. Before my postpartum brain erases all of the prep and work that I did, I wanted to write it all down to share exactly how I got organized to turn my classroom over to a sub, without stretching myself too thin!
Tip 1: Create Digital Folders by Week
I found that the simplest way to share master copies with my long-term sub was to organize digital files by week, rather than try to print them all out and file them away in paper form. Chances are good that you already have digital copies of most of the assignments that you are doing in class. You may also have slides or digital presentations that you use to introduce content. For me, our entire curriculum is housed both online and in paper form, so it was easy for me to copy files and organize them in Google Folders for my sub.
I also put links to our team’s pacing guide, team lesson plans, and other important school documents over to those folders. That way, my sub has access to everything that she needs to function as a teammate during my leave and she doesn’t have to wonder where to find critical information! Below is a picture of what the folders look like. You can see that my center rotation slides are linked, my grades document, pacing guide, and weekly folders for every week that I’m out.
Tip 2: Take Pictures of Routines and Procedures In Your Room
Something that occurred to me with this leave that had never occurred to me before. The biggest gift that I could give my sub is consistency for my kids. If my students do not get to carry on the same routines and procedures that we have done all year long, it will create more chaos for the sub than she needs in her life.
So, this time around I did something different: I took pictures of the steps of all of our core routines and procedures. Then, I put them in picture form in my maternity leave binder. My maternity leave binder includes all of the information that my sub needs to run our classroom, along with pages with pictures and directions for all of my routines and procedures. It’s like a handbook for how to run my classroom, without me having to be there to explain it!
Write out Step-By-Step Routines for Your Instructional Blocks
This was also a new idea for this maternity leave. Instead of trying to write out weekly lesson plans, I wrote out routine pages for each of my instructional blocks (math, reading, writing, etc.). I have learned with past maternity leaves that weekly lesson plans are not the best idea. There will ultimately be schedule changes and shifts in pacing that you can’t anticipate, because you aren’t there. School will be delayed or canceled for weather one day, there will be a fire drill that cuts a lesson short, kids won’t understand something and it needs to be taught twice, etc. When those shifts happen, having a black-and-white, formal plan for weeks on end does not help your sub. It just makes it harder for them to figure out how to keep going.
Instead, I decided to turn over the curriculum and the pacing guide, so my sub knows roughly which chapters we should be working on during different weeks and when tests should happen. And then, I turned over all of the slides, worksheets, etc. that the sub will need to actually teach the lessons. Then, I wrote out a step-by-step description of what a typical math block/ela block looks like.
Giving my sub the tools that she needs to teach, rather than boxing her in to a plan that she may or may not be able to uphold, took a lot of work off my plate, and honestly is more flexible and helpful for her in the long-run!
Make Your Own Maternity Leave Binder
If you want a binder just like the one I made for my own sub, you can find it in my TPT store! This made it easy for me to stay focused and organized while prepping for my own sub, so I never felt stressed or overwhelmed with the prep work!
If you’re reading this post because you’re preparing for your own maternity leave - CONGRATULATIONS! If you want more tips on how to balance mom life and working as a teacher, stick around. I’ve done it 4 times in a row now, and I promise it’s possible. ;)
