Emergency sub planning made easy for middle school ELA teachers who want to start the year off ahead of the game.
One of the hardest parts about being a teacher is being gone for a day…let alone two.
It’s not like other jobs where you can just put in your PTO and then trust that everything will be taken care of.
Instead, you have to worry about whether or not you’ll even get a sub, whether that sub is competent, and what you can realistically leave the sub that will keep you on track in your planning.
Personally, we like to have a plan for both emergencies and planned scenarios. Let’s talk about the planned sub situations first.
Planning for a Sub in Middle School ELA
When you’re going to be gone for a planned absence, you have the ability to actually make a plan that will allow your students to continue to move forward with their learning. This may look like giving them additional work time on a paper they are writing, the time to work with groups on a project or even the time to read their books and take notes. When you happen to be in one of these scenarios when a planned absence comes about, you are lucky.
However, that is not the case for many middle school ELA teachers.
Sometimes, you have to plan a whole new lesson for a sub. In these instances, it is nice to pick a lesson that is on topic with what you’ve already been studying.
To make this process easier for middle school ELA teachers, we’ve created standards-based units that they can use in their classrooms. As an additional benefit, these resources can also be pulled apart into individual lessons that work really well for planned absences and emergency absences alike.
Click for the 7th Grade Bundle
Click for the 8th Grade Bundle
Each of the bigger units is based on just one standard, so the lessons within the standard are focused on moving students forward in their understanding of that skill. Use these lessons as the base for your planned absence, and you will have a lot less planning to do.
We don’t call it sub planning made easy for nothing!
Emergency Sub Planning Made Easy
Emergency sub plans are a whole other beast. These are the sub plans you need to have in your sub bucket at the beginning of the year in case you just can’t be at work.
You may have a little time to prepare, but it’s not much time if you have that. Or in some cases, like if your water breaks, or if you have to run to the hospital to visit a dying relative, you don’t have the luxury of time to figure out a lesson.
Emergency sub plans should be in a binder, folder, or bucket where you can literally pull them out, set them on your desk, and leave. Or, even better, call someone else to do them for you.
For these emergency situations, the lessons in the standards-based units also work really well. Just go through the units at the beginning of the year and pull out some of the stand-alone activities to have on the back burner, just in case.
If you make it to the end of the year without using them, then you can bring them out for those last couple days of school when you are wrapping everything up and reviewing.
Paired Passages and Digital Escape Rooms
In addition to the standards-based units, we also have 32 Paired Passages that you could have ready to go (learn more about them in this post), and we have digital escape rooms that can be shared with students through Google Classroom or your learning management system. Both of these resources are stand-alone resources that can be used on the fly. They are also high-interest and perfect for these emergency situations!
When we think about emergency sub planning made easy for middle school ELA teachers, we are looking for stand-alone lessons or activities that still give students a chance to focus on the content and skills they need but can also be given to a sub along with very little instruction. The many resources we’ve outlined in this post do exactly that.
Hopefully, we’ve been able to give you the tools you need to sub-plan with ease!
Happy Planning!
