Grab and Go Guides

  Context At my school we set weekly homework tasks in one of my subjects and fortnightly in the other at KS3. Homework is weekly at KS4. Teaching just over 400 students a week I needed to come up with some cheats else I would never have time for anything other than homework! I would love to take credit for these cheats, but they’ve evolved from conversations with many other teachers over the years.   For context I’m in a school where every student has a chrome book and we use google classroom to set homework’s. Thumbnails On google classroom you can get an overview of all students work on an assignment with small pictures of each assignment. If you can design tasks that allow you to see from a small picture that they have both completed their homework, and got the right idea you’re on to a winner!  This can work many ways: 1. Coloured boxes: get them to drag and drop the boxes into the right places. At a glance you can check they have a) moved, and b) got the right colou...

When I started this blog I was determined to help others with their workload. Over the years I had found lots of hacks that allowed me to cope with being a full time teacher with a predominantly KS3 timetable across two departments, teaching on average about 400 students a week, as well as being a Mum. I hope I have never given the impression that I'm an expert in this field, but it is one that interests me after meeting my limit a few years ago as I wrote in a recent post you can read here. Yet I still get to the point where teaching becomes too much. I reached this at the end of last term. Having got through a term with an Ofsted visit both at my own school and my husbands, and put on a fundraising concert for our new building, plus the usual workload of teaching, I hit the wall again. This time, embarrassingly, collapsing on the floor of the staffroom where I was found 15 minutes later having a panic attack because I did not understand what was happening to my body and spent the...