AI prompts for sub plans and emergency binders

Written for teachers. A sub plan a stranger can teach from — schedule, procedures, and the backup activity — and the emergency binder done in one evening.

• 01 Ten sections, from the 6am sick-day text to the day you come back
• 02 30 fill-in prompts — the full-day plan, the any-day emergency lesson, the procedures script, the backup shelf
• 03 30 follow-up steps, including the print pack and the one-page cover sheet a substitute reads first
• 04 30 failure modes, each with the prompt that repairs it
• 05 A 95-page manual, a printable quick-reference page, and a plain-text file every prompt copies cleanly from

The first is the one you plan. You know you are out Thursday, you have a real schedule, and it has to become something a stranger can run: what to say, what to hand out, what to collect, and what to skip if the period runs short. You paste your day; the prompt returns the script.

The second is the 6am text, and that day is won or lost weeks earlier by whether a binder exists. The emergency-binder section builds a self-contained lesson that works in February or in May, teaches nothing new, and runs entirely on paper printed in advance and stored in the binder. Its follow-ups write out every printout in full, say how many copies for your class size plus five spares, give the order they sit in the binder, and produce the answer key marked TEACHER ONLY.

Kit 02 never plans new instruction — that is Kit 01’s job. This kit packages, scripts, and protects: procedures a stranger can run, a backup shelf for when the plan dies at 9:40, the multi-day absence, the hard periods that cannot just “do the worksheet,” reading whatever note the sub left, and re-entry day.

The failure modes here are specific to being absent, and three of them recur no matter which model you use.

A model will write an emergency lesson that quietly depends on where the class is — a reference to last week, a routine a stranger would not know. The repair finds every one of those lines and replaces it with something self-contained.

It will ask the substitute to teach. A substitute hands out, keeps time, and collects; the repair rewrites every part of the lesson as reading, practice, review, or writing students already know how to do.

And it will call for materials that cannot live in a binder: links, videos, devices, a class set you would have to go find. The repair restricts the lesson to what can be printed today and sit in a binder for months, with any reading in the public domain or written out in full.

Section ten is the assembly evening: the print list, the tab order, the one-page map a substitute reads first, and the quarterly refresh that keeps it current. It is an evening of work to get the binder assembled from pages that already exist — the nine sections before it are what produce those pages. Building all of them from nothing is a longer job, and the kit says so rather than pretending otherwise.

The class page is the section that has to be most careful in the whole catalog. Its prompts describe routines, seating logic, transitions and dismissal — never students. Names, medical needs and plan contents come from your school’s official systems and your own hand, never from an AI output, and no prompt in that section accepts a student descriptor at all.

The free starter card gives the three rules and ten cross-cutting prompts at principle level. The follow-up chains, the failure modes and repairs, the quick-reference page and the binder sequence are the kit. Prompts are model-agnostic and work in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini; the runs behind this kit were against Claude, which the dated model-notes page inside states plainly.

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