Simple Ideas to Improve your Kindergarten Schedule

Your Kindergarten Schedule determines how well your school day unfolds. Take some time to rethink your schedule using my tips and ideas.

If you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to get to make your own daily schedule, I have some tips for you. In the past, I have had a lot of control over what happened in my classroom for most of the day. There were a couple of periods a week that were assigned to prep coverage, but other than that, I got to decide what we were going to do.

Thinking about your schedule, keep in mind the needs of your students, and change it up when needed.

Minimal Transitions

One of the hardest parts of the day with young children is transition times. Whenever they have to stop what they are doing and change location or activity- chaos can ensue. Instead, I opted for as few transitions as possible. We had large blocks of uninterrupted time for centers. This just makes your life easier and makes your day run smoother.

Transitions are inevitable though, and this blog post gives you some ideas for what you can do during them.

Free Choice Centers

Another way to make your life easier- teach students to self-regulate through centers. This isn’t the easiest thing to teach them in the beginning, but makes your day so much smoother when they are able to do it. I even had them choose when they have snack, no more stopping the whole class to eat at the same time.

For more information about how free choice centers work in my classroom, check out this blog post.

My Kindergarten Schedule:

9:10- Entry Bell

9:10-9:45 Entry, school announcements, large group time

9:45-11:00 Literacy centers

11:00-11:30 Outdoor recess time

11:30-12:00 continue literacy centers

12:00-1:00 lunch & recess

1:00-2:00 math centers

2:00-2:40 free choice centers and open snack

2:40-3:10 gym

3:10-3:30 read-aloud

This is in no way a perfect schedule. For one, I didn’t have a choice for our morning recess time- we have to share the kindergarten yard with a lot of other classes.

I am constantly finding ways to improve our time in the classroom, and reflecting on the classroom schedule is a great place to start.

Do you have any questions about your daily schedule? What works for you? What isn’t working? Let me know in the comments!

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