Planning guided math lesson plans for substitute teachers?
“What do I do?” is a question teachers often ask. Well, great timing! I was planning guided math lesson plans for substitute teachers last week because I had the flu, not the “just don’t feel good flu” but the “better not leave the house” flu:(
Here are some choices.
Choice number 1: If you are using the half rotation schedule (having a large group mini-lesson and then meeting with two groups), you can leave plans for this along with details about the other two groups and their stations.
Choice number 2: Make a large group mini-lesson day out of it.
It is hard to detail all of the teacher interaction that happens during guided math groups and rotations for a substitute teacher. It requires a lot of time to detail the entire guided math process in writing for someone else to understand and follow.
My usual suggestion and personal choice is …. #2! I take the whole time and chunk it into small segments of learning. Guided Math has great flexibility as a framework and allows for this. So how do teachers do that?
Look at breaking your 60 minutes into the following large group mini-lesson activities. These are options. You do not have to use them all, only enough to fill the time.
- teacher reviews current skill (chalkboard, interactive whiteboard, video)
- students practice current skill (dry erase boards, math journals)
- students complete an assessment (ending quiz on current skill, ongoing skills assessment of review skills, or pre-assessment for next upcoming skill)
- teacher introduces new engaged math activities; students pair and play
- problem based learning activity
- practice current skill in a new form (extending a chart, story problems, graph, algebra form, etc.)
When planning guided math lesson plans for substitute teachers, you can use the above ideas to plan for specific math instruction to maximize the math time. Hope this helps the next time you are feeling under the weather.