Customer Reviews

Your Best Year Yet! A Guide to Purposeful Planning & Effective Classroom Organization (Teaching Strategies)

5 star:		(6)
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This book takes all the great ideas for teaching kids to be independent in the classroom and puts them together in one place. After teaching middle school for 7 years, there are things in here that I have done, and things I wish I'd thought about sooner. It gives you plenty to think about and many ways to enter into the process of streamlining the routines in your classroom making it a better place for both student and teacher.

As teachers we are always searching for ways to make our classrooms more efficient & effective. I love the ideas in this book. My favorite part is the way the author creates systems that teach kids to be independent and active learners & organizers! This book is great for new teachers but also provides a new twist for those of us who have been teaching for many years.

I am going into my 2nd year of teaching and have found this book to be immensely helpful. I taught a split grade my first year and struggled with organizing all of the curriculum information and keeping my plan book organized in a way that helped keep me on track for the year.

This book by Shoshana Wolfe is awesome for getting organized. She shares her own story of these strategies helping her as she had to move her class multiple times after 9/11. From setting up a year-long curriculum goal sheet for each subject area, to planning monthly calendars to serve as the foundation for all planning and teaching, to the artifact binders and homework notebooks, this book is packed with refreshing ideas that new and veteran teachers alike can benefit from.

I am so glad I purchased this book. I will definitely be using a lot of these strategies this year with my new class.

I wish I'd had this book before I started my first year as a teacher! It provides incredibly useful ways to organize and keep track of classroom activity - from the big picture of planning (and changing) curriculum throughout the year, to the minutia of how to arrange the steats or what to do with all that paper that accumulates. I've been teaching for 7 years, and recently borrowed this book from a colleague, and learned many new tricks, like how to re-think my classroom setup and how to keep an eye on long-term goals, while maintaining order in the day-to-day workings of my classroom.

I particularly love how the author stresses the value of students' sense of responsibility in the classroom - this has been my experience too. The more students invest in their work environment, the better they will take care of it, and if we make it an easy space in which children can learn and use materials independently, they will certainly do this! It makes everyone's job easier to work in an organized space.

Your Best Year Yet offers great suggestions on how all teachers can make the most of what they have, no matter what their situation. It teaches that children are viable resources for creating and sustaining an organized classroom community. It is extremely well-written with great models, templates, photographs, sample student and teacher work, and, most enjoyably, first-hand accounts of the author's own experiences as a school teacher. As a teacher in an integrated classroom, I have found this guide to be very helpful!

I just wanted to ask whether people think this book would be helpful to teachers at the secondary level. I mostly teach language arts for kids with mild to moderate learning and behavioral impairments.
I want to improve in the ways I managing planning, grading and classroom behavior.

Thanks!

(I had to add stars in order to post, apparently, but as I've never read this book obviously they don't mean anything!)