Teacher Work Days

Our School District has these days about every other month. It is a day when the kids are off, and the teachers are doing training or lesson planning or . . . I guess I'm not sure what because I've never been a public school teacher in our district. But anyway, last year, I took a couple "teacher work days". I would go somewhere, usually a place that had wi-fi or at least access to computers, and I would work on lesson plans, selecting curriculum, researching, that sort of thing.

Now that my sister and I are co-homeschooling, we decided that it was even more important for us to have Teacher Work Meetings. The plan was that we would plan out our lesson plans for the next month, go over the calendar for the next month, and discuss any problems that we were having or things that we needed to change, and to talk about what was going really well.

Well, we started school around the first of September. So for our September meeting, we just talked at my house about our general impression of how the year was starting and how we thought the schedule was going. By early October, it was obvious that we were going to need to make some changes, and so we had a couple more short meetings at my house, brainstorming about what we could change/what we would change to, what needed to be bought, what we could look at and see if it would work, etc.

And then we planned our monthly meeting for October 24th. And it was a good meeting. We met for 3 hours over at my sister's house after her kids were in bed. But we didn't really get any lesson planning done. We talked about the calendar, we talked about problems and good things, but mostly, we went over all the books that we were planning on using and deciding how we were going to use them, and when. I think we have FINALLY come up with our final plan. Or at least close to it. I don't anticipate making any more major changes anyway. Oh, and we met from 9 pm to midnight.

So we still hadn't had an actual Work Day to do lesson planning for November. So we went to Borders on October 28th. And we worked for about 2.5 hours. We did our lesson planning. And ate some good sandwiches and drank some tasty drinks. And didn't have one interruption from any children. It was great. Our next work is scheduled for mid-November.

Do any of you do monthly "teacher work days" or regular planning time?