When you’re a teacher, no two days are ever the same. When you work with over 400 students on a rotating basis, that might be even more true! In my role, I work with every student in our PK-8th grade building. Starting your day with 4-year-olds and ending it with 14-year-olds typically makes for an exhausting, but enthralling ride!
In this post, I’ll give you an overview of what my teaching world looks like daily, weekly, and how it all fits together over the course of a school year.
The Big Picture: A Year of STEM
While I work with 27 different classes of students, I teach five of those groups each day. Our specials schedule is broken down into grade span groups, so I see one group from each span during their assigned 50-minute time block. While it wasn’t always the case, COVID led to us adopting a specials schedule where we keep the same class for a week at a time, and then rotate to the next group in the span.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. There are 5 grade span groups – PK/K, 1st/2nd, 3rd/4th, 5th/6th, and 7th/8th. Each of those grade span groups consists of 5-6 classrooms. So, in the 3rd/4th span, I start the year seeing Classroom A for a week. During the next 4-5 weeks, I rotate through the rest of the classrooms in that span, before starting back with Classroom A again. (When they aren’t in STEM, the students participate in our other specials — art, music, PE, and multimedia/library.)
All in all, I see each group of students for 30-35 lessons during the year, depending on the number of different classes in that particular grade span and how our days off fall in the schedule. While the school year can seem long, I try to remember that I really don’t have that much time with each group and focus my energy on making those 30-35 lessons engaging and full of joyful, creative learning.
My Weekly Schedule
Each week, then, I teach 5 different groups of students, one from each of the grade spans. This lends itself nicely to my preferred, project-based approach to STEM, filled with exploration and iteration of ideas.
There are many benefits to keeping students for a week at a time – we can work on more complex projects, I don’t have to find storage space for as many in-progress projects, and you can build some nice momentum over five consecutive classes. That said, it can definitely be difficult to try to build coherence when there are 4-5 week interruptions to our STEM curriculum. I’m finding ways to make it work, though, and feel like the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, especially for our older students.
I also really like getting to teach the same lessons for multiple weeks in a row, as I get a chance to immediately implement refinements and improvements – the groups that come later in that rotation definitely benefit from the trial and error I get in the first groups. I teach grade-level specific curricula to students in kindergarten, first, and second grades, but teach two year, looping curricula for the 3rd/4th, 5th/6th, and 7th/8th grade spans. (I’ll talk more about how I created my curricula and what they look like in a future post.)
My Daily Schedule
In four years in this role, my daily schedule has never been the same. Here’s what it looks like during this 2021-2022 school year.
| 8:30 – 8:45 | Advisory | I serve as an advisor to a small group of 6th grade students. They come to the STEM Lab when they first arrive at school for a quick check-in and small activities that help to get the day started on a predictable and positive note. |
| 8:45 – 9:30 | Prep | No matter how our schedule changes, prep always seems to be first period, as classrooms have Morning Meetings and their settle-in times when they arrive at school. I love knowing that I can start my day with prep – I’m at my freshest before I start teaching, so I am usually able to make the most of this block of time. (Stay tuned for a future post about how I optimize my prep time for maximum productivity.) |
| 9:30 – 10:20 | PK/K Block | I love that my first class is with my kindergarten and PreK groups this year! They are eager to engage in all of our activities and these are often material-heavy classes, so I appreciate the time to get things set up before they arrive. When it is a week when I have a PreK class, I only see them for 20 minutes during this time block. |
| 10:25 – 11:15 | 1st/2nd Grade Block | I used to teach second grade in a general education classroom, so I have a soft spot for my second grade engineers. We start off the year with stations and more single-session classes, but these groups move onto projects by the middle of the year. |
| 11:15 – 11:45 | Lunch | During my first year in this role, my lunch was at 10:20. It made for a very long afternoon and my tummy was always rumbling by mid-afternoon. During lunch, I work on my professional projects – in fact, I’m writing this post while enjoying some lentil sloppy joes. |
| 11:50 – 12:40 | 5th/6th Grade Block | When I first stepped into this role, I was nervous about teaching middle school students. After some initial time to get my footing, I now really enjoy working with my 5th & 6th graders, as our STEM projects can take a huge step in complexity in these grade levels. |
| 12:45 – 1:10 | PM PreK or Mini Prep | Once every 5 weeks, I have an afternoon PreK class during this block of time, but otherwise, it’s a little break in my day. I always have grand intentions for this block of time, but it typically becomes a time when I clean up the mess that’s been created during the first classes of the day and then take a few minutes to catch my breath! |
| 1:15 – 2:05 | 3rd/4th Grade Block | If I had to return to teaching in the general classroom — but please don’t make me! — I would want to teach 3rd or 4th grade. My makers in these classes are engaged, passionate, and incredibly persistent. I always look forward to seeing how they’ll tackle each new challenge or project. |
| 2:15 – 3:05 | 7th/8th Grade Block | I enjoy ending my day with the oldest students I teach – their projects are always the most complex and interesting, but they can also be more self-sufficient, which is perfect for when my energy levels are waning at the end of the day. The only downside of this placement for this group is that sports games and activities periodically disrupt the STEM experience for those students who participate. It can be challenging when half of the class leaves at 2:30 for a basketball game! |
| 3:05 – 3:30 | Wrap-Up, End of Day Duty | At the end of the day, I tidy up my room, process my emails, and have a hallway duty during dismissal time. When I’m not running an afterschool STEM club and don’t have a meeting to attend, I try to be ready to leave right around 3:30 so that I can maximize my time with my 1-year old son. I will sometimes circle back to school work again in the evenings, once he’s gone to bed. |
So that’s a look at my STEM teaching schedule. With so many moving parts and the transitions between different groups, most of my teaching days just fly by — sometimes at a frenetic pace!
Do you teach STEM or another special? I’m always curious to learn how other schools structure these blocks, so I’d love to hear how your schedule is similar to or different from mine.