The morning your plan lands in someone else's hands, the pages that decide how the day goes are never the lesson pages. They are the Wi-Fi, the escort list, which child must not walk alone, and where the fire route actually is. This binder puts those pages first, in the order a substitute reads them, and leaves every school-specific fact as a labelled blank for you to fill once.

What is inside

• Before You Close the Door - the eight blanks a substitute cannot guess: guest Wi-Fi, the office number, the nurse or front-office alternate, your room phone, the copier code, your first- and last-period duty, the students who must not walk alone, and where the spare pencils live.

• Start Here: the first ten minutes - a five-step script for the bell, the settling period and the moment something is off, so the day is decided before the lesson starts.

• A Note to My Substitute - one page you write in your own voice: the age range, the tone you want today, the one thing that usually goes wrong in your room, and the early-finisher rule.

• Daily schedule, class roster and seating chart - the three pages a substitute uses every hour, with a note column for the things only you know.

• Students to Know About - six lines, because anything longer becomes a list nobody reads.

• Routines and Procedures - ten situations that come up in any week, two lines each, in your words.

• Emergency Card - fire, lockdown, severe weather and medical, sized to tape inside the front cover.

• Three lesson-plan shapes - one self-contained class, a stations or centres page, and a period-by-period page for middle and high school. Print the one your room actually uses.

• End of Day report - five minutes of the substitute's time that tells you what to fix before the next one walks in.

• Early Finisher Menu - ten options plus blanks, so "I am done" has an answer that is not a new device.

• Room and school information, binder tabs and a spine label.

Two ways to fill it

• An editable slide deck - every table, blank and tab is a real shape you click and type into, not a flattened picture. Type once, print the year.

• A printable PDF in both US Letter and A4 - 18 pages, black-and-white safe, for the teacher who prefers a pen and a page protector.

Who it is for

Any teacher who covers for colleagues, keeps a binder in the cupboard for the day they cannot come in, or hands the room over for a PD day and does not want to write it all again in an email at 6am. Nothing in it assumes a grade level: the primary page, the stations page and the period-by-period page are all there, so use the one that matches your room and recycle the rest.

Details

• 18 printable pages, supplied in US Letter and A4

• 16 editable slides - type into the tables, blanks and tabs

• Answer-free by design: no invented school facts, no names, no dates

• Licence: one classroom, unlimited students, unlimited years

Fill it in once, keep it in the cupboard, and hand the room over without writing the same six things in an email at midnight.