Summer is over and school year is now in session. During this time, you are probably already thinking ahead planning your first lesson plan of your first unit. With first year planning, comes also taking stock of accessible resources including writing various types of worksheets.
For the new teacher, this may seem a daunting task. Building an extensive resource of worksheets takes a long time. You, like any new teacher, are probably overwhelmed yet curious as to how to begin this process. Of course you'll have to try and survive like any other teacher, but the good news is you don't have to make up and recreate every single worksheet for your students.
The ideal situation is to pool all available teacher resources on staff and in your learning resource centers. If you find yourself stuck, go the files on hand at your school, and look through for ideas generic enough to help get you started. This could mean taking the ideas of one of the many free worksheets from this site and adapting them to meet the needs of your student.
One popular misconception lies in the idea of free worksheets. Free worksheets aren't better than your own ideas. In addition, just because a worksheet is free, doesn't mean that it is especially good for your class. Also keep in mind that most of the free worksheets on the Internet are very generic and can [and should] be adapted for meeting the needs of your students. The ideas however are there: you'll just need to rethink of them as curriculum worksheets for the important needs of your students.
Part of the learning process for a new teacher involves experimenting with utilizing free worksheets, whether it be from the Internet or from your staff. You will never know in advance whether the teacher ideas from the classroom worksheets will work well with your students. It is almost a random 'hit or miss' situation. However, in order to maximize your points for success, try to aim for:
- following your intuition. What was successful about the worksheet? What wasn't?
- is the teacher idea doable? ie Can the students actually perform the task on hand?
If the answers to these questions are 'no,' you'll need to do some major revamping on those free worksheets, which will inevitably benefit your students in the long run. Plus, you'll be teaching yourself new skills that are important for new teacher independence.
To sum up: A worksheet must be custom made for your students taking into account their skills, abilities and if possible, their interests.
Over to You: Take a look at a free worksheet you've recently downloaded from the Internet or that you've found in a teacher's box. How can you adapt it (restructure it) to meet the needs of your students? What elements of it will you need to change? Consider: the level of instructions, visual elements and layout, content based activities, age appropriate tasks and the graded elements.
