Amazing Relief Teaching Daily Plans and Activity Ideas

Posted by Teach Starter

Whether you are a newly graduated teacher seeking some experience or a professional teacher, relief teaching can be a little daunting. Especially if you turn up to a class with no daily plan! At Teach Starter, we have put together a huge variety of amazing relief teacher daily plans, resources and activity ideas to ensure your relief teaching days run as smoothly as possible.

Relief Teaching Daily Plans and Resources

We now have 42 Relief Teaching Day Plans …and counting!  Each plan has a set of morning, middle and end of day activities with matching resources. Print out the plans and resources to create a folder for each year level.

When you’re called in for a day and find out the year level you have – grab that folder and you are good to go with age-appropriate lesson ideas!

As an added bonus, we’ve also put together some fun relief teaching ideas that will work in a classroom. Take a look below…

Cute idea!

No relief teaching daily plan is complete without this! This activity gives the students a reason to work and be proud of what they have achieved during their school day with you. I absolutely love this idea!

Provide each student with a post-it note at the beginning of the day.

Throughout the day encourage students to write down one thing they have done that would make their classroom teacher proud!

What a beautiful display for the classroom teacher to walk back into the next day! I would be booking this relief teacher in a second! I used a border template in the Teach Starter Studio, it would be easy enough to print a handful of these to have in your bag and would be appropriate for any year level.

Fun Craft Activity

Thanks to Relief Teaching Ideas for the inspiration for this activity.

A number of skills are used in this craft activity! Plus, they look super cute and are a nice display for the classroom. In this one, I compared day and night, but you could compare seasons, feelings, planets, two main characters…the options are endless. Link the craft activity back to a topic the students are learning about! Plus, you only need colour pencils and paper.

I used 2 pieces of A4 and 1 piece of A3, but you could use one A4 piece of paper cut in half and then another piece of A4 paper. It all depends on what is available to you on the day! Remember, it’s all about being flexible when you are a relief teacher!

Once the students have finished their two pictures, have them turn over the pages and measure vertical lines. I made mine 3.5 cm wide. Label one page A-F and the other 1-6. Then have them cut out both pictures.

Have the students measure vertically along the A3 piece of paper, again I measured 3.5 cm. They will stick the pictures back in the right order, alternating between strips cut from the day picture and the night picture.

Once glued on, students follow the lines to fold the whole piece into a fan shape. All done!

A fun activity the kids will love, and a great learning opportunity to talk about comparing and contrasting!

Pack a Deck of Cards

A deck of cards is perfect to have in your relief teaching goodie bag! There are so many mathematical concepts that can be reinforced using a deck of cards. Here are a couple of examples. For more awesome ideas, check out our blog – Nine Nifty Ways to Use a Pack of Cards in the Classroom.

Fraction and Addition Draw Game

A great game where students create and compare fractions. Best played in pairs.

Aim – to create and compare fractions, ultimately being lucky enough to pick and create the largest fraction.

How to play

1. Take out the face cards except for Ace – this will represent number 1.
2. Shuffle the cards and place them face down in the middle of the players
3. Each player draws two cards from the pile and creates their own fraction.
4. The smallest value must be placed at the top of their fraction.
5. The fractions are then compared and the player with the largest fraction wins that round and gets to keep their cards.
6. The other players must return their cards to the bottom of the pile of cards.
7. Each player keeps adding the value of the cards they have won until one player reaches 50 – they are the winner!

Make 10 Pyramid Game

This activity can be an individual activity, such as solitaire. Alternatively, it can be played by more than one player by keeping score after each round. A great fast fact game that kids enjoy playing!

Aim – To remove as many cards as possible from the pyramid that add up to 10.

How to play

1. Remove all face cards except the Ace – this is the number 1.
2. Create a pyramid shape with 6 rows (like the photo above). Each row should slightly overlap the previous row.
3. The remaining cards become the draw pile.
4. The object of the game is to remove cards that ‘make 10’. Students can remove one card (being a 10) or remove two cards that add up to 10.
5. The cards that are removed must be completely uncovered. Therefore, at the start of the game you can only remove cards that are in the bottom row.
6. The cards that add up to 10 are placed in a discard pile off to the side.
7. If a player can not make 10 with any of the uncovered cards in the pyramid, they need to draw a card from the draw pile and can use this card to ‘make 10’. If they still can’t make 10 they continue to draw until they can make 10.
8. When the draw pile runs out, a player can shuffle the discard pile and draw from there.
9. The game is over when a player can no longer remove cards from the pyramid.
10. If playing against each other, the player’s score is the total of all the cards left in their pyramid. The person with the smallest number wins that round.

Use Dice

There will always be some dice hiding in a classroom! Just like a pack of cards, there are so many different mathematical concepts that can be taught or reinforced using a couple of dice!

Place Value Activity

This is just one idea! A great way to reinforce place value.

Provide students with two different coloured dice, they need to decide which will be the tens value and which will be the ones. They then roll the dice and create the number by drawing MAB’s and the number! Make it harder by providing the students with more than two dice for larger numbers!

Vocabulary Building Activity

Either draw each dice side on the board or take along printed faces to use again and again. I used the dice pictures out of our 0-10 Number Matching game which could be used for other activities as well.

Choose a word and have students roll a dice. Then, they need to follow the instructions on the board and write down either the chosen word in a sentence, provide a definition, a synonym an antonym, act it it with a partner or say if it is a verb, noun or adjective.

Writing Activity – Newspaper Article

Encourage students to re-create boring newspaper headings to tell their teacher about the events of the day. They could be real events or silly made up events!

A great writing activity that will give the students a purpose to write! I used our Journalism and Newspaper Classroom theme pack for these cool templates!

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