Summer Team Planning Meeting with FREEBIES

 A few years ago, I posted on Instagram about our summer team planning meeting.  I have never gotten so many DMs asking for more details and requesting the documents we used.  So, I am finally putting all the details in a blog post for you all!  In this post, I will break down what summer planning meeting is, why we have it, how to plan for it, what our schedule looks like, our menu and gift exchange, and include some freebies for you to download to plan your own team summer planning day.

The year I posted about our meeting was the year I was the team lead.  The team lead typically hosts summer planning at their house.  This is our first grade team from that year.  We all came with our matching planners ready to plan for the upcoming school year.  I miss this team so much!  😭 You can find the teacher planners HERE!

What is the summer team planning meeting?

Our district would let us have one day in which we would meet with our team during the summer to plan for the upcoming year.  They would allow us to apply those hours to our professional development requirement.  We used this day to set our PLC norms, create our calendar for the year, work on pacing guides, assign team jobs, create our schedule, plan CFAs for the year, and share any trainings we had already been to that summer.  This day was vital to our success the following year, so we really treasured having this time together.  

It wasn't all work though!  We would also bring food and do a gift exchange, which I will go into more detail explaining later in the post.  We used this time to bond and just have a day of fun together.  Having it at someone's house just allowed us to have a more laid back atmosphere and helped to create and foster that family dynamic with our team.

Lunch and Gift Exchange

We always did Mexican food for our lunch.  I just set up a note on my phone with a list of items needed that I shared with the team.  Everyone would put their name beside the items they would bring.  The list included everything you needed for tacos, sides, drinks, and dessert.  

Everyone also brought a gift that was around $15 for a gift exchange.  We exchanged like you would for Dirty Santa.  We all drew numbers and went in numerical order.  The first person chose a gift and opened it, and then the next person could steal that gift or open a new one.  We did put a limit on steals.  It got really competitive, which made it even more fun. 😂

I will include the menu and printable numbers in the download. You can edit it as needed after you download it.  The fonts I used are The Skinny from DaFonts, AG Boss Lady, and AG Nope Not Today.

Team Planning Agenda

We created an agenda for the day to keep us on track.  We also had to turn this in to the district for the professional development hours.  We cover most things that need to be discussed before the beginning of the year.  We also delegate different jobs to everyone that they can do over the summer so that the back to school time isn't quite as hectic.

Team Jobs and PLC Norms

During our meeting, we discuss job assignments for the next year.  This is what made our team run like a well-oiled machine.  There are so many things that we as teachers have to do, that it just makes sense for one person on your team to focus on that job to alleviate everyone else from it.  We were fortunate to have a large team, but this would still help out a lot with a smaller team.  

Everyone gets a yearly duty job and a lesson planning job that they are responsible for.  I was responsible for putting together lesson plans that year for the team as my yearly duty.  We all used the same lesson plans; there is just no other way to plan these days.  There is just too much to do and too little time.  Everyone is responsible for a subject.  I give them a template to plug theirs into, and then they send it to me.  I put them all together into one file that we then turned into admin each week.  I will work on a post that goes into more detail about plans and share my templates there.

We also set our PLC norms for the year.  You can see ours above.  They pretty much stayed the same from year to year.  Our team would meet weekly for PLCs with admin.

Create Class Schedules

We were given overall class schedules from admin that were fairly general.  They included ELA and math blocks, science/S.S blocks, recess, lunch, and related arts times.   We just wanted to create a more specific schedule.  I included a copy of our first grade schedule from the year, because I know how helpful it is to see how someone else's day is broken down.

Essential Skills and Common Formative Assessments

At the time of this planning meeting, our district had us choose five essential skills for ELA and math that we deemed essential to have mastered before the end of the grade level.  You can see what we used below for first grade at that time.  The district now chooses the essential skills.  We had to give common formative assessments every three weeks to assess mastery of those skills throughout the year.  This drove our intervention groups and instruction.  

At our meeting, we would go ahead and map out the dates for each assessment.  We also discussed what the CFAs should look like and assigned those to team members to create.  I thought you might find this helpful, but if not, you can just ignore that part in the file.

Pacing Guides

One of the other major jobs we tackle at summer planning is our pacing guide for the year.  The team lead shares the template on our share drive and then everyone can add their part.  We like to have this finished by the beginning of the year.  The district does provide pacing guides for each subject, but we liked to have it in a condensed version like this for easy reference.  I added our to the file, but you will need to change the dates to match the year.  We add standards covered for each week, as well as a little snippet that describes the standard.

I hope this post helps you in planning your own team's summer planning meeting.  Please let me know if you do have one by tagging me on Instagram @thelemonadestandteacher!  If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me!  Don't work too hard this summer!  You can grab the FREE download from the pop-up window in this post that includes all of the documents I used at our planning meeting.  Just put in your e-mail, and it will automatically give you the link to download the file.