Daily Helper and Team Captain: 2 Must-Have Classroom Jobs ·

In the elementary classroom, classroom jobs are essential to help ease the burden you have as the teacher. As a new teacher, knowing where to start with classroom jobs can also be overwhelming. I love utilizing a Daily Helper and Team Captain in my classroom to take care of the majority of classroom jobs.

Looking for the must have classroom jobs for your elementary classroom? These two roles can take care of most jobs in the classroom.

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The Daily Helper and Team Captain is an easy way to take care of a lot of the jobs you encounter during the school day. Of course, there are lots more classroom jobs (which I’ll talk about in just a second!) but if you are struggling with what jobs to start with, start here!

Role of Daily Helper and Team Captain

The Daily Helper and Team Captain are pretty self-explanatory. Their job is to help the teacher with daily tasks in the classroom.

The Daily Helper is kind of like the “teacher’s helper.” He or she does any task the teacher might need help with like running a paper to the office, helping a friend with a skinned knee to the nurse’s office, or passing out papers to the class.

A Daily Helper can accomplish a lot of the daily tasks that could have their own jobs (line leader, electrician, plant waterer, etc.) at the beginning of the year when you are just trying to keep your head above water with all the things going on in teaching world!

Student moving clip from \"absent\" to \"present\"

The Team Captain is like the daily helper, but only for their specific team. I am a huge proponent of Cooperative Learning and students sitting in teams, so this will likely only work if you also have your students in teams.

Again, the team captain helps the teacher with any daily tasks that need to be done for the table group. Jobs like this include getting team materials, collecting papers from the team and turning them in, or even picking up trash around the table at the end of the day.

How it Works

The Daily Helper and Team Captain should rotate on a daily basis. If that is too much to keep up with, consider having a Weekly Helper instead.

To manage this, it is best to give each student a number (typically done alphabetically) and create cards with numbers on them to change each day. (Download the Daily Helper and Team Captain Freebie to get this ready-made straight to your inbox!)

Here is a quick video showing how I implemented this in my classroom.

I created a freebie to help you implement this right away and you can get it here!

Other Classroom Jobs

Daily Helper and Team Captain are a great way to start out with Classroom Jobs. However, I think adding a more diverse selection of jobs is important to allow more students the opportunity to have responsibility in the classroom.

Some of my favorite classroom job ideas are ones that help me like Clean Up Crew, Pencil Sharpener, the Banker, and Librarian to name a few. I also loved some of the ideas Thom (a middle school teacher) shared with me on the podcast.

Daily Helper, Team Captain, and Classroom Jobs all fit in nicely to a Classroom Economy where students can earn money for their jobs then learn how to manage that money through the Classroom Store and even paying rent!

Maybe you have no Classroom Jobs and are ready to start or you already have specific Classroom Jobs but are looking for some more generic roles to take care of things that come up throughout the day. The Daily Helper and Team Captain are a great pair to add to your Classroom Job list!

You can check out the Behavior Management Economic System to learn how to implement a Classroom Economy (all these jobs!) and behavior management into one big, engaging way, to teach your students and manage behavior.