My life has been consumed over the last few months with prepping for my baby. However, I have to admit that a huge percentage of that energy has been dedicated to making sure my other babies are taken care of while I am on leave. As a (very) controlling and type A personality it is extremely difficult of me to delegate and trust someone else with kids. Prepping for the maternity leave substitute has been a challenge to say the least. I’m ready to share my plans and processes! Fingers crossed it goes well 🙂

The All Encompassing Google Doc

The first thing I started when prepping for maternity leave was the all encompassing google doc. This helped save my sanity and hopefully will be a big help to the substitute. I started it as a running commentary and notes on each part of the school day. I went through each center or station and wrote a description of how it should be run, what the students do, where master copies are located etc. Then this document continued to grow. Through my school day I jotted down anything I thought that a sub might not realize. Little things like one student leaves 2 minutes early for dismissal to pick up his brother or another student can carry around  water bottle during the day. I wrote down things such as where extra dry erase markers are and the emails of the clinicians that work in my room. At the end of each day I added it to the google doc. I’m not going to lie – the document became super massive. I am not expecting a substitute to read and memorize it all but I’m hoping it will serve as a nice reference when the sub does run into questions or problems. This honestly really helped ease my anxiety because I didn’t have to worry about forgetting to tell them something – it was already in the google doc.

Specific To Do Lists

I am a big fan of to do lists and checklists. There is pretty much nothing more exciting than crossing things off of a to do list (that makes me sound incredibly lame…). I made sure my sub had very detailed to do lists for things that need to be done weekly, monthly, and quarterly. I even included photos so there were no questions. This will help ensure that everything is done that needs to be and nothing is forgotten!

Leveled Daily Curriculum

What was literally life saving during this maternity leave planning extravaganza was my Leveled Daily Curriculum {Language Arts & Math}. Because of this beauty – my language arts and math curriculum is completely planned out. Every. Single. Day. Even if I wasn’t taken leave this year – this is insanely huge and time saving on a whole other leave. I made sure to clearly explain how to run the curriculum to the sub in the google doc.

I also went ahead and photo copied the units for the entire year (sorry to that forest I cut down – I promise it’s worth it).

I put the first 3 units in students’ binders and kept the rest organized by student in the back closet.

In addition the photo copying the curriculum, I also photocopied, organized, and setup the homework for the entire year from my Leveled Homework Packets.

Setting Up Prompts for My Students

My rigid little rockstars are my biggest asset as far as keeping the room running consistently while I am gone. They are not shy about calling someone out on how something is supposed to be – wonder where they get that from? I made sure that their routines are set and strong before I leave. I also embedded a bunch of prompts class wide for them which will keep the sub on top of what to do and also teach my students to advocate for themselves and problem solve!

Editable Lesson Plans

We all know in the special ed world life can change in a minute. We have these beautiful lesson plans and then drama calls and all of those plans go out the window. For my maternity substitute – I knew I needed lesson plans that could be changed. I made all of my lesson plans available on google drive so the sub will have access to edit each plan. I made plans for each of my group for language arts and math instruction. I put which page of the curriculum we (estimated!) would be working on plus any additional and supplemental activities. The nice part of the curriculum is that with doing one page each day it will be easy to catch up a bit if we fall behind 🙂

I also printed out the lesson plans and loaded them in chronological order in page protectors for each group!

Additional Activities Google Doc

If there weren’t enough google docs already – let’s add one more to the mix. I have been also working on an on going google doc that has additional activities for each group. I like my kids to be doing work that is appropriately at their level. So I have been continuously adding to a list of activities such as specific games, tasks, centers, etc. to the different groups of students.

Yes, it’s maybe a little overbearing. But this over protective teacher mama duck is okay with it.

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Sasha Long, M.A., BCBA

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