Five for Friday!!

After last week’s Friday Favorites link-up we decided we needed to participate in another one this week! Today we’re linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her Five for Friday link up! Today we’ve organized our five random facts…mainly because organization makes our hearts happy but we also thought the info would be useful to you all!

First up is an organizational tip. It’s no joke that we just love organization. We love color coding, we love our planners, and we love when everything has a place. This obsession has transferred over into our professional lives and we’ve learned that our students thrive in organization.

Back in May we wrote about how our students are so successful using our thematic pocket book series. First we choose an overall science or social studies theme. Then, we create weeklong units. These weeklong units each have one pocket in our binded pocket book. At the end of the mega unit, students take home a large portfolio of the science or social studies work they’ve completed! Check out these science and social studies themes organized into student portfolios below!

Extreme Weather Thematic Unit

This extreme weather pocket book above houses one pocket per weeklong unit.

This wildfire unit holds all the work each student completes during this weeklong unit!

This was our social studies thematic unit for December! Each pocket book follows the same format each week. And in case you needs a step-by-step visual, we attached our “How to Use” lesson plans below.

Next, we’re giving you a teaching tip this Friday! Recently we created morning work notebooks for our students and because we have varying levels in our classrooms, we of course differentiated these! Each student has the same morning work cover so they all look the same at first glance!

We also differentiated our class’ spelling workbooks. The words and activities inside are differentiated to each student’s level but the covers are all the same!

This most certainly is a teacher tip! Our students can feel embarrassed and have low confidence if they know their peers have more difficult work than them. We avoid such negative feelings with these sneaky covers. Ahhh we love little “teacher secrets” like this!

Because both teachers have a background in special education, “teacher tired” is a real thing. And “teacher tired” leads to burnout. Today we’re giving you a self-care tip.

The Double Dose of Learning authors are not only co-creators of TPT products, they’re teacher besties! Recently, one of the Double Dose ladies received a promotion to an administrative role. Although we miss each other SO much, we keep our teacher friendship alive though creating TPT resources! Creating these products together is a stress relief for us both! When we’re creating products we’re typically relaxing at home in our pajamas and with a cup of coffee. We love creating products after a tough day!

Our fourth tip is a behavior management tip. We started using brag tags in our classroom and our students (and us!) have been loving them! Because we could go on and on about these nifty inventions, we decided to write a post in the near future highlighting how our class uses them. Look for that coming soon!

We’re ending today’s post with a random tip! Something that gets the Double Dose ladies through the day is planning. And not just planning school-related activities, lessons, and events. What helps is planning activities outside of school in advance. We mentioned above that we love our planners…what we love more is putting something in our planner using a bright flair pen! This visual reminder stands out when we’re looking at our planner and gives us something to look forward to. These “outside of work activities” can be simple like having a girls’ night or grabbing dinner with a loved one, or they could be a bigger event! One of us just booked a trip to Florida in April and you can bet those vacation dates are circled, bolded, and highlighted in the planner! We SO wish we could post a picture of our planner but we keep so many personal things in them. However, we couldn’t resist a pretty planner picture!