What to include in a sub binder: the day at a glance, a page on the people in the room, the few procedures that hold the room up, the work itself with answer keys, the building and who to call, emergency procedures, and dismissal. That is seven sections, in the order a substitute reaches for them. Below is the short list of sub binder must haves, then each section in full, then what to include in sub plans for the day.
A substitute binder is a strange document. You write it for a reader you will never meet, who will open it under mild duress, in a hurry, in a room full of children who know more about the place than she does. It is the only thing you will ever write that gets read exclusively on your worst days.
Which is why the standard advice, “put together a sub binder,” fails so many teachers. Put together out of what? The binder is not a container to fill; it is a sequence of questions a stranger will ask between 7:40 and 3:15, answered in the order she will ask them. Build it in that order and it works. Build it as a pile of everything you could think of and the one thing she needs at 9:05 is behind the fire drill map.
Here is the checklist, section by section, in the stranger’s order. There is a free printable version of this checklist you can put on a clipboard and literally check off as you build; the sections below explain what each line means and why it earns its place.
Sub binder must haves
The short version, one line per section. Copy it onto the inside cover and tick each line as you finish it:
- The day at a glance: bell schedule, specials, lunch and dismissal on one page.
- The people page: medical needs, pull-outs, who does not sit together, reliable helpers, first names only.
- Procedures: five or six routines, written as words the sub can say.
- The work: a week of review the class can do without instruction, copies run, answer keys attached.
- The building: a map, the office extension, the nurse, and the teacher next door who agreed to help.
- Emergencies: fire, lockdown and severe weather routes, and the class roster in a sleeve.
- Dismissal: buses, walkers, pickups, and any note from the office in the office’s own words.
These seven are the sub binder essentials. Anything else can wait until they are done.
Section 1: The day at a glance
First page, single page. The bell schedule with your actual times, specials with the day of week and the walking destination, lunch with where your class sits, dismissal with who leaves how. Bold anything that happens today at a fixed time no matter what, like a pull-out group pickup.
The test for this page: could someone run the skeleton of the day from it alone, if they never opened the rest of the binder? Because on the worst mornings, that is exactly what happens.
Section 2: The people page
The five facts about your humans a stranger must know, one line each, first names: who has a medical condition and what to do about it, who leaves the room for services and when, which pair does not sit together, who is a genuinely reliable helper, and who will test a new adult early, with a sentence on what works. If a child has an allergy that intersects with lunch or snack, it goes here in bold, not in a district file the sub will never see.
This page is the highest-stakes writing in the binder and it changes as the class does. Date it, and refresh it when the seating chart turns over.
Section 3: Procedures, but only the ones that hold the room up
Not your classroom management philosophy. Five or six routines, each as a script the sub can say verbatim: how the class gets quiet, how lining up works, bathroom and water rules, what students do when they finish work, how papers are collected. Write the words, not descriptions of the words. “Say: voices off when the lights blink” survives contact with a Tuesday; a paragraph about your community norms does not.
If you have a class job board or a points system, one line on whether the sub should use it or ignore it. Ignoring is a fine answer; unexplained systems are how subs get litigated by 4th graders.
Section 4: The work itself
The heart of the binder, and the section teachers most often leave thin, because on a healthy Sunday it is hard to believe you will ever be too sick to email plans. You will. This section is the plan for the day you cannot write plans.
For math, the standing emergency work needs three properties: students can start it without instruction because it reviews things already taught, there is enough of it to outlast the fastest finisher, and the answer keys are attached so the day does not convert into a grading debt. A full week of it, not a day, because the flu does not honor single-day bookings. Copies already run, keys in a folder marked for the sub, everything reachable by a stranger reading labels.
This is the one section you can outright buy, and it is the best money in the binder. A print-and-go week per grade with keys included does exactly this job; the cards below have the version for grades 3 through 5, and the emergency sub plans page walks through the whole system if you want the reasoning first. Reading and writing need their own equivalent: a read-aloud with a response page, a standing writing prompt, anything instruction-free and long.
Section 5: The building
Where things are and who to call: the map with your room, the office, the nurse, and the nearest adult who can answer questions marked by name and room number. The phone extension for the office. Which neighboring teacher has agreed, in advance and out loud, to be the sub’s lifeline, because “ask the teacher next door” only works if the teacher next door knows she volunteered.
Add the small physical mysteries of your room while you are at it: the light switch that does nothing, the projector remote’s drawer, where extra pencils live. Every mystery you solve on paper is a question the class does not get to answer for the sub, incorrectly, in chorus.
Section 6: Emergencies
Fire, lockdown, severe weather: the routes, the assembly point, where the class roster lives for taking attendance on the blacktop. This section is short, boring, and legally not optional. Put the roster in a plastic sleeve at the very back so it can be grabbed whole.
Section 7: The way home
End-of-day dismissal deserves its own page because it is the most dangerous fifteen minutes of a sub’s day: who rides which bus, who is a walker, who gets picked up and by whom, and any custody note the office has flagged, phrased exactly as the office phrased it. A stranger cannot be expected to know that the man at the door is not on the list. The binder has to know for her.
What to include in sub plans for the day
The binder holds the standing information. The sub plans for the day sit on top of it, usually one page, and answer what the binder cannot: what happens today, in what order, and with which pages.
Include, for each block of the day:
- The time and subject, matching the schedule page.
- What to hand out and where it is: “Day 2 pages, green folder, top drawer.”
- One or two lines of directions to read aloud before students start.
- How long the work should take, and what students do when they finish.
- Who can help: the student who passes papers, the teacher next door.
- Where the answer keys are, and whether the sub should check the work or collect it for you.
- A line on the notes back: what got done, who helped, who had a hard time.
Sub plan examples are easier to copy than a list. Here is one math block written that way:
9:15 to 10:00, Math. Hand out Day 1 from the blue folder on my desk. Read the directions at the top of each page aloud. Students work alone or with a shoulder partner in whisper voices. Early finishers take a puzzle page from the back of the same folder. Answer keys are in the folder’s back pocket. Please collect the pages; you do not need to grade them. On the notes page, write who finished and who did not.
Write one of those per block. For the emergency copy, write the same kind of block but point it at the standing week of work from Section 4 instead of this week’s lesson.
Sub binder template (editable)
If you would rather fill in pages than design them, the Editable Sub Binder is the finished version: 41 pages, from the daily schedule and class list to safety procedures and a While You Were Out report, as a fillable PDF and an editable PowerPoint. It works for Kindergarten to 5th grade and is $6.95.
Free starter kit
The free Emergency Sub Binder Starter Kit is 14 pages: a sub note template, a checklist, and math pages for 3rd to 5th grade. It gives you a start on the note and on Section 4 for those grades. The math pages are 3rd to 5th grade only, so for Kindergarten to 2nd grade the math sub plans page has a week of work for each grade.
The one-page free sub plans checklist is a printable PDF of the list you build against, and it works for any grade.
Building it without losing a weekend
Front to back, this is one honest afternoon: most sections are a single page, and the printable checklist breaks the job into lines you can finish in any order. The work section is the only heavy lift, and buying the math week collapses it to a copier session. Print the checklist, put it on a clipboard, and build the binder before the season when you will need it, which is to say, before the first cold snap runs through your grade-level team.
Then put the binder somewhere visible, label the spine, tell the office and your lifeline teacher where it lives, and forget about it, which is the entire point.
The best compliment a sub binder ever receives is silence: a day you were absent, about which you heard nothing, because there was nothing to hear. The stranger found every answer in the order she needed them. You wrote it for her months ago, on a good day, so that neither of you had to improvise on a bad one.
Frequently asked questions
What should I put in my sub binder?
Seven sections, in this order: the day at a glance, the people page, the procedures that hold the room up, a week of work with answer keys, the building and who to call, emergency procedures, and dismissal. The sub plans for the day go on top of the binder, one page per day.
What are sub binder essentials?
The seven sections above: the day at a glance, the people page, procedures, a week of work with answer keys, the building, emergency procedures, and dismissal. If you only have an hour, do five of them first: the schedule page, the people page, the emergency routes, the dismissal page, and the week of review work. Those cover the parts of the day a substitute cannot improvise. Add the rest later.
Is there a free sub binder printable?
Yes, two. The free sub plans checklist is a one-page printable PDF for building any binder. The Emergency Sub Binder Starter Kit is a free 14-page file with a sub note template, a checklist, and math pages for 3rd to 5th grade.