Help Reduce Your Stress With This!

As a teacher, I’m willing to bet that you’re always looking for ways to reduce your stress, right? Between gathering curriculum, lesson planning, grading papers, and the like, having ones less thing on your plate would be nice. Speaking from personal experience, when I started being intentional about having everything prepared for a smoother morning, I experienced less stressful days. Nevertheless, the morning time often depicts how the rest of the day will go. Here’s one way to reduce your stress and enjoy more relaxed school days.

Reduce Your Stress with Morning Work

What is morning work?

Although morning work isn’t a new concept, it’s one that is often overlooked as a useful tool in the classroom setting. Why? For most teachers it may seem insignificant and equivalent to “busy work.” I beg to differ! Morning work helps with transitioning students through important parts of the day, especially when they first arrive to the classroom. It’s also a way to make the most of every minute your students are in your classroom (no more boredom). Last but not least, morning works reduces behavioral issues and sets the tone for the day. These are no-brainer reasons to include it in your classroom.

What should I use for morning work?

This is a very important question that get’s asked quite often. To reduce your stress and keep your students engaged at the same time, you’ll want to make sure your morning work is the opposite of simply trying to keep them busy. This is all about finding the right resources and incorporating them in manageable, relevant, and useful ways. I created a variety of morning work bundles for my students (and yours) that can be printed as worksheets or used interactively (using EASEL by TPT). These are easy, no-prep resources that can be used year-round.

How do I use morning work effectively?

Once you’ve decided to start using morning work and found some resources you’d like to use, it’s now time to make sure you incorporate them in the most effective way. To do this I strongly suggest creating a spiral review kind of morning routine. Here’s an idea of what one may look like:

• Mondays: introduce a new worksheet pertaining to a specific subject (math, reading, grammar, etc.). Keep your students needs in mind while choosing what to start with at the head of the week
• Tuesdays – Thursdays: have students complete a variety of morning work worksheets that relate to the chosen concept. Take time to go over any answers and consider leaving a few minutes for discussion.
• Fridays: do one big review and/or quiz your students on what was practiced throughout the week. This will help you see how much your students have learned and what else still needs to be worked on in more depth.

The overall goal I aim to reach is using morning work to boost my student’s skills.

Reduce Your Stress with These Morning Work Resources

As I mentioned before, I created tons of morning work resources. Here’s a nice roundup to help you get started with creating your morning schedule using resources that are guarantee to keep your students engaged:

• Second Grade Morning Work
• Daily Language Bundle
• Daily Math Bundle

Enjoy! In the meantime, I’d like to hear from you. How do you reduce your stress in the classroom? And do you use morning work? Let me know in the comments below!