Summer break is in full force. I finished working on curriculum at the district office last week, so now it is time to make sure that I start getting myself ready for next year! The first day of school is just under two months away, and I'm teaching 10th grade next year, which I haven't done in several years, so I've got some planning to do.
My first order of business is to do some general organizing, and I'm going to start with my teacher binder. I have searched far and wide, but have not really found a teacher organizer/grade book/planner that I have fallen in love with, so I have created my own templates and put them into a binder. I made it in the middle of last year, but I plan on making some updates and changes for the upcoming school year.
I'm starting with the my daily attendance logs. Our school is on an alternating A/B block schedule, so it is a challenge to find anything that is easy to use and works with an alternating schedule. I LOVE making and working with spreadsheets (I know that is a nerdy confession, but it's true), so I used Excel to make my daily attendance logs.
I started by creating separate tabs for "A" day and "B" day. I teach high school, so I made space for up to 30 students in each class. I made ten 5-day weeks and put in the dates for the first nine weeks of school. I added shading to the columns, first for the school holidays and teacher work days, and then for the alternating schedule:
These separate evenly so that there are 5 weeks on each page, and I just 3-hole punch them and put them in my binder.
At the bottom of each page, I added my "key" for taking attendance. When I was taking my education classes, one of the teachers I observed showed me how he combined his grade book and attendance. To mark a student absent, he outlined the box for that day, and if the student came in late, he put a diagonal line in the corner of the box, making a triangle. I really liked his method, but I have added to it since then.
I don't combine attendance and the grade book because I like to be able to give myself more information than I could if I had to save space for grades. Like Mr. Stephens, I outline the box if the student isn't in class when I take attendance. If the student doesn't show up, I put an A in the box at the end of class. If the student walks in late, even 2 seconds late, I make a diagonal line, which creates a triangle, in the upper left-hand corner to show that the student was late. If the tardy is unexcused, I leave it blank, but if it is excused, I fill in the little triangle. If the student is more than five minutes late, I write the time that he or she got to class. When a student leaves early, I make a triangle in the upper-right hand corner of that day and mark the time.
This gives me a lot of information that the online attendance record doesn't provide. First, if a student shows up tardy, but has a pass, I don't mark it as tardy in the official attendance record, but it still helps me to know that the student was late, especially if I'm grading warm-up activities and wondering why a student didn't turn it in. Second, my school counts students absent if they are more than fifteen minutes late to class--this way I know if a student was actually absent or was just more than fifteen minutes late. Finally, this method helps me track not only how often a student is late, but how often a student is REALLY late. Someone coming in a minute late once a week is different from someone coming in 10 minutes late once a week. This helps me see patterns and, let's keep it real, I sound much more impressive when I'm talking to parents and can tell them exactly how often and how late their child was.
Since I make one set of pages for each quarter, I can just print them out one grading period at a time, and then put them in my filing drawer at the end of each 9-week period. This keeps my teacher binder from getting overloaded with papers, yet allows me to keep my records on hand.
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