Making the Most of Short Class Periods
You can do a lot in a short amount of class time!
For some grades, many people consider shorter classes to be better than longer classes.
A general rule of thumb my mom always shared is that the activity should be as many minutes long as the child is old. So for a 2nd grader, our activities should be eight minutes or so.
Smooth School Systems
32 weeks, 25 minutes each class comes out to about 13 hours, or about two school days. This framing can be helpful when we communicate to other support staff.
Bathroom breaks, water breaks, picking up on time, showing up on time, etc.
These solutions start with clear communication. Your administration’s job is to solve problems and make the school run smoothly.
We can’t control a teacher being late to drop off the class. We can control what we do with the class that we have in front of us. So let’s talk about that.
Every Moment Counts:
Teacher talking - most classes are taken up with teachers talking. This goes in the category of things we can control. Here are some things to expand or add to your collection of strategies:
Classroom routines and procedures
Hand signs (sit, stand, focus, rest position, etc.)
Visuals and written directions
Write out the wording of questions
Think through (and act out) the teaching process for games and activities
Just start singing - when a class is chatty, one strategy is not to wait for everyone to get quiet. Just start singing, and students join in.
Transitions - Music happens all the time, even between activities. This is something I’ll talk about in the next episode. Sing your closing song as students line up. Use notational literacy as a way to tie lesson segments together.
For meaningful transitions, we need clear classroom learning goals.
Clear Goals: Two Learning Objectives
Even with a short class period, I generally don’t recommend focusing on one single concept for the entire lesson. I recommend breaking up the learning into two lesson goals - one rhythmic and one melodic.
Breaking up the lesson with intention - two objectives to prioritize
Remember that we need different activities to break up the lesson anyway for maximum student attention.
With two clear goals to frame the lesson, we know what to do if our activities get cut short because a class is dropped off late. We can prioritize our time in short lessons.
What do we need to know or be able to do before we can successfully ___x____ next class?
This reframes the way a single lesson is situated - not as an isolated event, but as a small piece of a larger puzzle.
Part of a Puzzle, not Isolated
Threads across several lessons, not isolated experiences for a single lesson. This also helps with retention.
We’re not cramming everything into a 25-minute class. We’re looking at how the class segment fits in the overall picture of the entire year.
Sample Lesson Schedule
Inside The Planning Binder, the monthly plans are structured this way with specific minutes allotted for each lesson segment.
Opening: 3 - 4 minutes
Focus Concept: 9 - 13 minutes
Change of Pace: 4 - 5 minutes
Secondary Focus Concept: 9 - 13 minutes
Closing: 3 - 4 minutes
This comes out to 28 minutes, but I would adapt it to alternate between 8 and 3 minutes for each activity.
