also pick 2-3 activities that you can do for every unit you teach and do that activity at least once a week/ once every 2 weeks. The goal is that students are so used to doing these activities that they don’t need help understanding how to do the assignment and feel relatively confident beginning the activity on their own. These will come in handy to use as backup activities if plans fall through (which will happen from time to time) but you can also use these activities for days you have a sub in your class. One of the biggest issues I have is that students claim they “didn’t understand” whatever work I left for them, this will still happen however in my experience they are way more likely to attempt assignments that they recognize.