Today a colleague was out. His plans were on his desk; all student work, overheads, read alouds, etc. were ready to go for the substitute.
Only there was no substitute.
Seems we couldn't get one to cover his class (or another in an upper grade), so we had to split his students among the remaining five of us. (Sometimes being a large school can be a good thing, especially when it comes to something like this. I have been in schools where there is no sub for a class and either the students were cobbled together to watch a movie and do busywork, the class was split between maybe three other classes and given "split packets" to do, or the teacher tried to teach a class that had grown by perhaps 10 children. None of these is a good scenario.)
My class grew by four today, so I had 22 bodies. (One of mine was absent.) Overall, it wasn't bad. The students joined right in with my class and we worked on our assignments with no problems. Things may be a little hairy for my colleague when he returns tomorrow (Thursday), because the students did slightly different things with each of the other teachers. While we are all on the same story in reading and just about the same lesson in math, the social studies and science curriculums are all different. (We have to rotate the science kits, so whoever is not doing science is working on social studies.) I'm sure he'll work it out.
What do you all do when there is no substitute to cover your class? Does your principal pull someone from another class or area? Do you split? What happens? Drop me a comment and let me know.
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