Summertime Relaxation: Recharge your Energy (and your Databanks)
Relaxation and Stress-Release
Summer is the time to recharge your energy. You can recharge even if you teach summer school, enroll in graduate courses, or work at other full (or part time) jobs to make ends meet.
How, can you recharge when you are tired and working?
Answer: Because a change of pace is balancing and stress-releasing.
Answer Number Two: Because you intend to make it so, you plan to make it so, and you do what is in your best interest to ready yourself for the "quick flip in activity levels" that is your mini vacation.
Get some exercise. Have some fun…
- Take walks, hike, enjoy a picnic
- Swim
- Try yoga, tai chi,
- Play (or make noise on) a music instrument
- Go dancing, skating
- Play golf (but only if you are not competitive…against yourself or others(
Recharging your Databanks
Recharging your databanks means slowing down your thinking so that you are ready to accelerate during the upcoming school year.
Recharging your databanks includes strategies such as…
- Thinking and incubating ideas, then writing them down as action items or goals
- Brainstorming and fantasizing…imagine how exhilarating next year will be when these new ideas are implemented and tested
- Putting together research in a structured manner so that it is organized for use during the upcoming school year
- Build the ideas around themes, novel ways of looking at the world, the ways that students look at the world
- Build more project-based learning, more learning centers, more real-world research
- Strategic planning, putting together a library of generic materials that you can reuse (use ten, twenty, thirty times is the goal)
- Think of strategies where learning activities are self-correcting, group-scorable, or where "spot checking" serves just as well as paper grading. This will decrease the time that you waste by grading "mountains of papers with mole hills of benefits to your students."
Sidebar
This recommendation to focus on reusable materials is a hallmark of the Classroom Toolkit strategy.
Other Tools
Here are a few tools that assist in your research…
- Developing a vision and overview
- Any of the mind mapping programs
- FreeMind™
- Inspiration™
- MindManager™
- MindGenius™
- Collecting Web Research
- Use a structured virtual folder system
- Sort (rename the information if necessary) into folders and sub-folders
- Use a program such as Surfulater™ to collect your Web research
- Build a Graphics Organizer Library
- Check out all the printable, usable Graphic Organizers with a Starter Kit at Classroom Toolkit
- Figure out how you can train students in the use of one graphic organizer format, then make subtle, but sequential, variations that stretch your students' thinking during the course of the school year.
Summary
"Take it easy" now, but take it easy in a way that allows you to do more work in a relaxed and focused way once school starts.
Focus your summer preparation for the upcoming year on essentials, modules…trainable procedures that are adaptable for many subjects, assignments and lesson goals.
With a bit of stress-free planning and stress-erasing relaxation, allow yourself to target a goal of maintaining a calm and peaceful attitude for the upcoming school year challenge.
You will accomplish more with a calm, focused and relaxed attitude, anyway. And, you will be able to attend to your students communications (and unexpressed needs) better if you have your life and your attitude under control.
Sidebar
This is also the type of learning environment that is most conducive to maximizing your students' learning.
Rest. Recharge. Re-energize. Reinvigorate.
"Then, let the games begin."
