Summer Self Care for Teachers

That time of year is finally here! Yes, it’s summer! 

Well, it is for me anyway. If it isn’t summer when you’re reading this then I hope it becomes summer break very soon for you. 

Summer break can be a magical time. Teachers can finally take some much needed down time to relax and unwind fully. Us night owl teachers can finally stay up past 11 without regret in the morning and we can all sip our coffee before it changes temperature on us! 

Summer is also a wonderful time of year for making sure that you are taken care of because you, teacher, have spent nine or ten months taking care of other peoples’ children this year. You’ve earned the right to focus on yourself. 

So, since it is the beginning of summer break there’s plenty of time to focus on self care. There’s some debate about how many types or domains of self care that there are, but I enjoyed this list of eight types of self  care from Rocky Vista Health Center. It feels like a very comprehensive list of self care types. If you want to learn more you can visit their blog post on the topic here. I’m going to stop blabbing and just give you lots of ideas for this in your personal life and your teaching life. 

8 types of self care

• Physical 
• Emotional
• Psychological
• Environmental
• Professional
• Social
• Spiritual
• Financial

Physical

• Take up a hobby to get you moving
• Create a simple exercise routine
• Focus on getting more steps in than you did the month before
• Set timers to take a ten minute walk every 1-2 hours
• Focus on drinking enough water
• Start taking a vitamin (immune support because kid germs, ‘nough said)
• Get in the habit of having veggies at every meal or at one more meal than you’re currently eating (have veggies at lunch and dinner instead of just dinner, for example) 
• Get enough sleep each night (I’m remind myself of this one) 

Emotional

• Journal your thoughts and feelings
• Spend time by yourself with no distractions
• Have a good cry (If you’re like me then you need to read a very sad book to do this) 
• Go to a rage room and get the frustration out
• Set boundaries with certain people in your life, you know who

Psychological

• Learn something
  • This can be a new recipe or taking a professional development course. You don’t have to learn new things about teaching unless you want to. 
• Set some goals
  • These can be big personal goals like learning a language or how to tango or you can set a goal to have all of your centers prepped for back to school
• Do a social media detox (comparison is the thief of joy, after all) 
• Play some games or do some puzzles, they help keep your brain sharp
  • One of my forms of self care is to play board games because I just enjoy them so much

Environmental

• Make a cleaning routine for your house and try to stick to it
• You can revamp your classroom jobs so that the room is tidier at the end of the day
• Try to workshop an organization system for all the papers you need to manage in your home and in your classroom (if you’re like me they are completely different systems)
• Make a decluttering schedule for your home and classroom
• Do some planning (personal or school) in a new location for a change in scenery
• Take a day trip or vacation to somewhere new

Professional

• Evaluate your work-life balance, are there areas where you can improve?
  • Make a plan for better work life balance in the school year ahead by identifying what took up the majority of your time now. Did you spend all your time lesson planning? Sketch out big ideas now, so you can focus on nothing but details later. Was grading your biggest time suck? Figure out some strategies to make grading faster for yourself so you can get home earlier. 
• Show kindness to a coworker
  • You really want the secretaries and custodians to like you, just saying
• Network with people who teach the same grade or content as you

Social

• GO SEE YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY!!!
  • Sorry for yelling, but if you’re like me all your best friends live at least an hour and a half away. Summer is when I see them the most because we are either taking music PD together or we decide to have sleepovers. But summer break is THE time to make sure to see your people. Try to get tired of their face. 
• Create new connections with people from work
  • This is a great time to hang out with your teacher bestie outside of the school. I went to bingo with a few teachers from my school and had my mind blown because of the competitive style bingo. If you haven’t tried it, you should. 
• Call someone you haven’t seen in a while
  • This is a great time to call a teacher friend that may have moved schools, or to call a teacher friend from your old school 

Spiritual 

• Meditate or pray
• Spend time in nature
• Spend time deciding your core values
• Spend some time manifesting
• Learn about astrology

Financial

• Set up sinking funds
  • I highly recommend this because sinking funds for various things have helped me to not blow up my budget from month to month. All you do is figure out how much money you need to set aside in a period of time and put that money in a savings account.
    For example, if I want to pay the six month premium on my car insurance to save a bit of money I would figure out how much to set aside over a given amount of time to do that. In my case, I set aside $100 each month for six months to pay the next six month’s car insurance. 

• I also have sinking funds for professional development courses, conferences, and professional memberships, just in case my school district decides not to cover the expense or I can’t find scholarships to attend such things. 

• Make a budget and stick to it as best you can
  • Make sure to take into account things like vacations, event (birthday/ anniversary) expenses. Budget in starbucks if it’s that important to you. You’ll be bad at budgeting the first few months, but you’ll finally learn where all your money is going and will be able to tailor from there. 
• Check in on your retirement accounts
• Set some financial goals
• Pay off debt 
• Set up a High Yield Savings Account
  • Just do it, you’ll thank me later. This is where I keep my sinking funds and emergency fund and last month I made almost $7 in interest with less than $3,000 in my account. 

You can definitely tell which forms of self care I typically indulge in. I hope you find something beneficial from this list. My recommendation is to pick one or two things that you can do daily, like take a vitamin and drink water, and maybe one thing that will take time to develop, like budgeting. 

I personally, enjoy the self care that benefits my future self the most, so those are just my recommendations. Have a great summer and get plenty of rest!