Creating a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly schedule as a PE Teacher is much different than creating one as a classroom teacher. Not only do you have limited amounts of time with each class, but you see every class and every student throughout the month. Keeping organized is essential and I am sharing some of my favorite ways to do that today, along with some time-saving and sanity-saving resources. Organizing the Year If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out my Scope & Sequence Resources to help you get a big-picture view of your yearly expectations for each grade. Then, it becomes helpful to break everything down into units, especially if you are on a class rotation like my district. I see each class for one-week chunks and we are on a three-week rotation. Because of that, I see each group about twelve times during the year. For this setup, it is easiest to make each unit one to two weeks in length. For some of the more general units like agility, movement, and sportsmanship, I incorporate these throughout the weeks since they help support the more sports-specific units like jump rope, basketball, and soccer. Organizing Your Week This is the first year that our district is going to a modified late-start Wednesday schedule. Now, every class will meet for 50 minutes with a 10 minute break in between except Wednesdays, which will be a 40 minute class with a 5 minute break in between. Every day, I see all grades K-5, so being able to organize the flow of the week also depends on organizing setup time during those few minutes between groups. With less setup time between classes on Wednesdays, and accounting for the shorter meeting time, I am going to make Wednesdays my Game Day since prep-work and supplies can stay relatively consistent between classes. I also like to have a Friday Fun at the end of each week where I will have students rotate in their squads to the cool features in our gym like rope swing, climbing wall, scooters, and rotating stations based on our units, both past and current. That leaves every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday to dive into the units of study and teach skills, work in stations, play mini-games, and incorporate sportsmanship, agility, and assessment. I encourage you to put some of your days like this on "auto-pilot"-- while you will still need to plan them out, the routine makes management easier and builds excitement for the students each week, especially if you only see them once a month-ish like I do. Organizing Your Day While each day is the same, I found as a PE Teacher that I had to be just as organized during my planning time and time in between classes as I was during my teaching time. I see every class every day, so that means that when third grade leaves, I may have a Kindergarten class coming in next. Thankfully, I have a principal who organizes the morning by upper grades (3-5) and afternoons by lower grades (K-2), but equipment needs to be adjusted and stations tweaked to ensure safety and success for each group. This is especially true for stations, which we relied upon heavily last year since it kept kids more separate for COVID protocol. When planning my stations, I try to keep the theme and/or skill pretty much the same in Grades 1-5. I have found Kindergarten to be its own beast, especially the first half of the year, but I will go more in-depth in a leter post. When most of the stations are the same, all I need to do during the transition time is switch out minor things, like the size and/or material of the balls or simplifying the setup with cones or poly spots. I also take pictures of the setups and keep them in my phone, since throughout the next few weeks, I will need to repeat this two more times (since we're on a three-week rotation) for the other classes in that grade. With pictures available, I can double-check when I inevitably forget how a station was setup or which type of equipment I used in second grade versus first grade. Organizing Your Class Just like organizing my week, I like each of my classes to follow a similar structure, K-5. Not only does this build routine and familiarity with the students (especially year to year), but it allows my brain to adjust from one class to the next and not have to worry about planning out 50 minute classes, six times a day, five days a week. I just don't have the bran capacity for that! Each class is 50 minutes long and follows the same general structure: As you can see, the times of these sections range over several minutes and you can use your best guess class-by-class and grade-by-grade to determine what works best. And at the beginning of the year, expect these times to be completely out of whack as you set up routines and expectations. I'll include some tips in a future post about that. My Favorite Planner Some of you have asked where I like to plan everything and, hands down, my favorite teacher planner is from Simplified. I did a huge review of this planner last year that you can read about HERE and watch a walkthrough of on YouTube HERE. This year, there is are updated covers, but the inside remains the same and I found it to be ideal for listing stations, games, accommodations and adjustments, and more for my PE classes last year. Plus, it was so easy to track what activity I had done with what group so I didn't have any repeats or gaps. I used three different colors to plan for each of the groups. *If you have been following me for a while, you know that color coding is my love language! Because of that, it was easy to find what I had done with the group in the previous rotation and make new plans accordingly. As much as I tried to have three identical weeks for each unit, each weeks was just a little different, so being able to keep track of those changes was important. To find out more about the Simplified Teacher Planner, click HERE. What questions do you have about organizing, planning, and scheduling for your year ahead? What suggestions and tips do you have to share? Be sure to leave a comment below and I look forward to hearing from you. Stay well,