How to make a para schedule

Start with the fixed points you cannot move: arrival, lunch, specials, dismissal, and the bell times of the building. Then fill in what happens between them. Write every block with its exact start and end time. If the early bus arrives at 7:52, write 7:52, not 7:45 or 8:00; rounding is how two duties end up quietly overlapping.

Include the short blocks. A ten-minute walk to the art room is a duty with a place and a role, and it is often the moment someone asks where you are. Here are the first blocks of the example day, before anything else is added:

A time and a title are not enough to act on. For each block add where it happens, a group label if one applies, and your role in one plain sentence. “Sit with Group B during partner reading” tells a substitute what to do; “Reading” does not. Give each block a type as well, so the day can be scanned for supervision, transitions, and time assigned to another room.

Use room numbers and group labels rather than students' names. Your school decides what, if anything, about a student may be written in a schedule, and roles are usually clear without it.

Two kinds of break look alike on paper and must not be confused. Your own break is time you are not available for classroom assignments. A student's scheduled break that you supervise is a duty. Label them differently, and write your own breaks as the school sets them; the break times in any starter are placeholders.

Whenever responsibility passes from you to someone else, or from someone to you, write the handoff as its own short block: when, where, and to whom. The example below comes from the one-to-one starter. The five minutes before the adult's lunch are a handoff in Room 104 to the relief adult the teacher names, so the student's lunch and the adult's break never blur together.

On a team, each break needs someone who takes over. The zoning guide shows how to plan breaks with a clear handoff so the relief is written down, not assumed.

Here is the whole day, fifteen blocks from the 7:52 bus to the 2:50 reset. On the left the day's shape on a time rail, where overlaps and gaps are easy to spot; on the right the list an adult actually reads, each row with its time, type, and place. Choose a row to see the role and the rest of its details.

Before you call it finished, read it once as the adult who has to follow it:

• Every minute from arrival to dismissal belongs to a block, or is deliberately left empty.
• No two blocks overlap unless you meant them to.
• Every block names a place and a role you could act on without asking.
• Your own breaks, and every handoff, are written as blocks with exact times.

A schedule goes wrong when three versions exist: the one on the fridge, the one in the email, and the one in someone's head. Keep a single maintained copy and make every other version come from it. In Para Schedule, you review the day and choose Use this version; from then on Today, the week, and every printout read from that copy, and each shows its version number, so an older printout is easy to spot.

Most changes afterwards are not changes to the routine at all. When one day is different, record the change for that date only, and the regular week stays as it is. See how to record a change for one date, and how to print a pocket schedule each adult can carry.

You do not have to type the first draft. The para schedule templates page has six original starting structures: a daily routine, a week that changes by weekday, a one-to-one support day, a floating day across several rooms, classroom team rotations, and a period-based day. Each one is fictional sample duties in the order above, ready for your own times, places, and roles.