Teachers spend a lot of their time in the copy room at their schools. They make copies of work sheets, assignments and activities for every day lessons. Find ways to organize your copying so that you do not spend time every day at the copier, and when you are making copies, find ways to multitask.
Having a Copy Basket
When you are preparing your lesson plans and come across something that will need to have copies made of it, place a master in a copy basket. With a yellow highlighter, write the word master across the entire page to be copied so that you will always have a master for future use. When copying this master, the yellow highlighter will not show up. Then on Friday, after your lessons are completed for the next week, take your copy basket to the copy room and make all of your copies for the next week.
Utilize Parent Volunteers
Have parent volunteers take the papers you will need copies of and sit in the copy room making your copies for you. This will free your time up to teach, plan or grade papers. If you are organized, you can have your parent volunteers make copies weeks and months in advance. Using a curriculum map to know where you are headed in your lessons, and keeping old lessons on file with masters to be copied make it easy to pull out worksheets to send down to be copied. When the copies come back, be sure to put each lessons’ copies in a folder and file for later use.
Multi-Tasking while Making Copies
Running the copy machine can be a very tedious job. Most copiers have the capability of you putting a stack of papers in, telling how many copies you want of each sheet and pressing start. Ten minutes later the machine will be finishing up the copies and you are set to go. Do not waste those ten minutes waiting for the machine to finish. The easiest thing to do while making copies is grading work. All you need is a correction pen, a stack of papers to correct and a surface to write on and you are set.
Make all your copies a week or a month ahead of time to minimize your time spent in the copy room. When you do have to make copies, take student work with you to grade while you wait. Whenever possible, have a parent volunteer make your copies for you, especially those last minute copies that you need to make.
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Jennifer Wagaman - Jennifer is a mother of 2 and has both public, private and administrative experience in the education field.
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