I am in the thick of Back to School preparations right now, and I’m the type of person that needs a list, otherwise I get sidetracked doing non-essential tasks. Pictured above is my Back to School checklist from years past. It’s set up for elementary as that is where I’ve been teaching for the past three years, so it’s in need of a little tweaking for middle school.
This happens to be one of the many documents that I keep in my Dropbox. I tend to tweak it a little bit every year, and it’s nice to have it in digital form until I’m ready to print it off and start checking things off.
The biggest benefit of a digital list like this is that I know exactly what I did last year and what I need to be sure not to forget this year.
In addition to the checklist, I also like to have a pretty little spiral notebook like this that I can take back and forth from school and home to jot down things as I think of them. Usually things that go in this notebook are things that won’t be recurring from one year to the next. This notebook is getting an unusual amount of use this year since I’m setting up a new classroom, and there are so many things that I need to do that I don’t even know about yet. I’m trying to get as much done that I know needs to be done this week, before the rest of the teachers come back, so I can be ready to ask questions and get advice from all the veteran middle school teachers next week.
Here’s a little peek at some of the things I’ve written inside this notebook. The highlighted items are the things that I’ve done. Sadly there’s a whole page of unhighlighted tasks on the next page.
I find checklists to be indispensable. I also have a checklist for preparing report cards and one for the end of the school year. You’ll never find me without one.
It’s how I roll.
What about you? Are you a list person, or do they stress you out?
