I might suggest you pick up Harry Wong’s “The First Days of School”. I recommend this book to all of my first year teachers, and we go through his video series together. The keys are:

1. Respect and Relationships

2. Procedures

3. Structure

4. Rigor and Relevance

In my classroom, I have all three kinds of routines. There are daily routines – when we do what. There are weekly routines such as Spelling tests, Math tests and Fabulous Friday. There are monthly routines which involves our monthly theme.

I would think that having routines for individuals or groups would be too confusing. Although sometimes this can’t be helped. For example, if you have students that leave the room for speech or resource, they would have a separate routine. But I make sure that those students know the when and the where; the other students don’t have to keep up with their schedule.

Part of the weekly routine involves learning a new unit or chapter. We follow the same procedures each time so that students can keep track of the facts better.

Routines are established by showing the students how to do what’s expected of them then practicing it over and over again. Dr. Say gave a fantastic example of a weekly spelling routine. So during the first few weeks of school, a teacher would go over this routine or procedure many times so the students learn what is expected of them. Dr. Say’s example is also a good example for a weekly routine as opposed to a daily one, so that should take care of question #1. Same thing for question #2, the entire class should be doing the spelling lesson for the week. As for question #3, I don’t like the word procedure – it seems to me that what you are being asked to do is come up with a lesson cycle, not a procedure. To me, a procedure is something like getting my students’ attention or passing back papers, while a unit with time allotment is more of a lesson cycle or scope and sequence.

Anyhow, here’s an example of the “procedure” I use with my ESL students when we cover a “unit:”

1. Access prior knowledge about topic/story – 20 minutes

2. Students define new topic/story vocabulary – 30 minutes

3. Introduce topic/story vocabulary – 20 minutes

4. Preview passage on topic/story – 20 minutes

5. Read passage on topic/story – 40 minutes

6. Discuss what we read – 20 minutes

7. Students complete vocabulary worksheet – 20 minutes

8. Project/writing assignment on topic/story – 60 minutes

9. Review for quiz – 20 minutes

10. Quiz – 20 minutes

Of course, this would not all be done during one day, but more like over the course of two weeks. Also, the project/writing assignment can be split over a couple of days. This is just a guideline.

Good luck!

I could be way off track since I am not really sure if I am understanding the question correctly but I will give it a try.

Establishing a weekly or monthly routine allows the students to know what will be coming up on each particular day so that they will never be surprised. For example: Remember when you were in elementary and had to do spelling units.

1.Monday-Write the words three times each

2. Tuesday-Write a sentence with each word.

3. Pre-test-If you make a 100 you would not have to take the test on Friday.

4. Thursday write the words that you missed on the pre-test

5. Friday-Test.

or maybe for a writing project in high school

First friday of the month-turn in topic

Second friday-turn in outline and resources

Third friday-rough draft

Final friday-final copy

This could be re-designed monthly so in case maybee the final friday still leaves a week left in the month.

This type of planning allows the students to have a routine that is long range and helps to development strategies for completing projects.

Hope this is what you were looking for.