Grab a Free Growth Mindset Escape Room for grades 4-8.

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Close your eyes, rewind the clock, and consider the first time you stepped into the classroom as a new teacher.

Perhaps the scent of the laminator lingered in the hall as the tile floors glistened with fresh wax under the shine of fluorescent lighting. Maybe your brain danced with decorating ideas, dreaming up ways to bring your bulletin boards to life with eye-popping designs, while your heart burst with excitement about meeting your first group of students.

Now, fast forward to the end of your first year. Did the stress of teaching cause you to exchange your rose-colored glasses for a looming feeling of overwhelm, exhaustion, and discouragement? If so, you’re not alone.

Although each new school year brings its own challenges and rewards, the first few years of teaching are often like building a plane while flying it. These formative years can be nothing short of a whirlwind, but they are pivotal for the longevity of your career in education, and I have the solution to help you fly your plane.

An educator’s days (and often afternoons and evenings) are jam-packed with teaching, lesson planning, grading, communicating with parents, collaborating with colleagues, participating in professional development, and so much more.

woman with hand out saying "stop buying lessons"

Read on if you’re tired of starting from scratch and need a dose of inspiration to put your own spin on your lessons. You’re tired of outdated textbooks or lack of curriculum. You’re barely treading water, just one straw away from snapping or leaving the profession you always dreamed of. You’re ready to grow your stockpile of innovating resources that you can continue to use down the line.

For many teachers, it’s hard to leave school stressors in the classroom, as they worry about students who may go to bed hungry at night or about the ever-growing stack of papers on their desks that need grading. Not to mention the increasing micromanagement and district paperwork.

According to a survey conducted by EdWeek Research Center, teachers spend about 54 hours per week serving in a profession that ranks with nursing as having the highest stress rate of any career.

Burnout appears to be taking its toll, as the Merrimack College Teacher Survey found that 44 percent of teachers said they’re likely to leave the profession altogether within the next two years.

With so much on teachers’ plates, it can feel impossible to accomplish everything within contract hours. Educators know that quality, data-driven lesson planning is critical for student success, but how is this feasible when to-do lists are miles long?

In a perfect world, teachers could devote uninterrupted time to creating lesson plans during contract hours. However, we ALL know this rarely occurs.

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While teachers can’t change everything wrong with the education system, they can adjust how they handle the stress that accompanies the profession with just one small step… 

The secret to maximizing your students’ success and your own professional growth, especially during the early stage of your teaching journey, is by using templates. Utilizing pre-made templates for your lesson planning is game-changing method that can help you ditch the stress, save time, and become a better teacher.

I used to waste countless hours scouring the internet, then purchasing lessons that only met a handful of my ‘needs.’ After I used the lesson just once, off it went to the filing cabinet for storage where I wouldn’t see it again for 365 days. I’ve dumped loads of money into TPT, but most of the resources I purchased could not be edited. That left me making a purchase I couldn’t modify, which means essentially, I was throwing my hard-earned teacher money down the drain.

What about learning disabilities, what about RTI, what about IEPS, what about gifted, and the list goes on…

With TEMPLATES, you can create differentiated activities tailored to the diverse learning styles of YOUR students. Using premade templates to create lesson plans can be an extremely valuable tool for educators. Templates typically provide a premade, well-thought-out structure for the lesson, including proven best practices. This can help educators stay on track and ensure that they cover all of the necessary content for the lesson while not boring students with the same old textbook work. 

Additionally, using a template allows teachers to ditch the textbook, save time and reduce stress, as it eliminates the need to start from scratch when creating a lesson plan.

Templates are useful because they provide a consistent and efficient way to reuse the same layout. This can not only save valuable teacher time, but it can also reduce errors by avoiding the need to manually copy and paste the same design, reading passage, or questions multiple times. 

In short, templates simplify the development process allowing you more time to focus on YOUR students. Templates can be easily updated allowing you to make modifications for YOUR learners. No set of students is the same, so the use of templates is an ideal differentiation tool to reach all learners. Templates provide a clear and consistent structure that is easy to follow.

Additionally, templates reduce the time and effort required to learn how to do something new, as teachers can refer to the template for guidance.

Lastly, you can update the template after reflecting on how the lesson went. Do you need to make some minor changes? Easy with templates! Do you need to add a few content-rich vocabulary words? Easy with templates! Do you need to modify the reading level? Easy with templates!

There are several ways to save time when creating lesson plans:

  1.   Use premade templates: This can provide a structure for the lesson and help to organize your thoughts and materials.
  2.   Plan in advance: Create lesson plans well in advance of when they will be used, so that you have time to make any necessary adjustments.
  3.   Keep a lesson plan template library: Save successful lesson plans that you have used in the past, so that you can easily adapt them for future use.
  4.   Collaborate with other educators: Share ideas and resources with other teachers to save time creating lesson plans.
  5.   Keep it simple: Avoid adding too many activities or materials to a lesson, as this can make it difficult to manage and take more time to plan.
  6.   Use technology: Utilize online resources and digital tools that automate or streamline the lesson planning process.
  7.   Prioritize: Focus on the most important objectives and activities that align with the curriculum and will have the most impact on student learning.
  8.   Be flexible: Be open to change and be ready to adjust your lesson plans as needed.

You may be spinning in a burnout cycle, but you don’t have to stay stuck! It’s possible to regain the hope and excitement you once felt when you first stepped into the classroom.

Teacher Template Toolbox is a 10 hour Professional Development course full of tactics and research-based EDITABLE templates for inquiry-based learning that help you create a student-centered classroom where critical thinking rules and fun reigns!

From editable escape rooms and scavenger hunts to secret messages, gallery walks and scavenger hunts, you’ll DEFINITELY find something that appeals to ALL your learners. These are not one and done templates, inside the course you can change the four digit escape room codes, change the mystery word, change the questions, change the topic or reading, change the images, change the puzzle and SO much more.

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Hopefully your brain is teeming with ideas of how to incorporate templates into your lesson planning. However, you may still have a few holdups about making this work. Join the Teacher Template Toolbox waitlist to learn about using templates to differentiate for YOUR students. Click HERE to learn more about the templates.

You have a decision to make… You could keep scrolling endlessly on Teachers Pay Teachers trying to find an activity in a sea of resources that “might” meet the needs of your students.

Go down the YouTube blackhole, thinking you’ll have time one day to create an escape room from scratch, then realize there is WAY more involvement than you thought! Invest in an uber-expensive bundle of worksheets in which only use a small percent of the products found inside…only to find out they are not editable. OR you can take advantage of the course, earn PD hours, AND lessen your prep time…

WIN. WIN. WIN.

If you want to learn more about creating your very own, tailor-made lessons for your classroom, click HERE to join the TTT waitlist!

Grab a Free
Growth Mindset
Escape Room for grades 4-8
and other freebies too!

Lisa

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Grab a Free Growth Mindset Escape Room for grades 4-8.

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