Planner Wars

Oh Mike Holmes... I want you to come to my house and re-do everything. That would make my life so happy!!!

And now for something completely different, a girl with 3 planners!

I am constantly looking for a better way to organize my lesson plans and keep track of each class from week to week. The big problem that I run in to is that there are all of these fabulous and cute teacher planners, but they are for regular classroom teachers. I really want to be able to come up with a way to adapt these to use for my class, but I haven't figured out the perfect solution yet.

I have a planner that I got from Lakeshore a few years ago that looks like this:

 

But it has 7 spaces across instead of 6.

And I wanted to make it look like this:
via: http://wisewittyteacher.blogspot.com

SSSSOOOOOOO PRETTY!!!!

So anyways, the grand idea was that I would have 1 color sticky note for each grade level (eg. Kinder=blue, 1st=purple, 2nd=pink etc.) (Another note, I would probably want to be super crazy and ROYGBIV the grade levels. That would make me feel better then it being random) And then line them up in the order that I have them on each day. I never have more than seven classes in a day, so it would fit perfectly. That way I would be able to write down what we're doing each week, and keep notes on each classes' progress with the activities to make sure that I keep everyone on track. It's really hard to remember which class it was that was acting rowdy so I wasn't able to make it through the lesson, and which class was full on angels last week so they got an extra activity.

I thought it was brilliant! I decorated the monthly section of my planner with the year's holidays! I was looking for millions of mini sticky notes! But then I thought...

"Am I really going to have the dedication and patience to put 24 sticky notes out in order each week, and update the class status during every lesson?"

And the answer is......

Drum roll please..................

No. :(

I know for a fact that on Tuesdays, when I teach 5th-5th-4th-4th-5th(25 minute lunch)3rd-2nd, I am not going to have the wherewithal to write anything down in the 0 minutes I have between classes. And by the end of the day I can't remember where I left my laptop charger, none the less what each class did! I need a better plan! So I stole my friend Amber's planning idea:





So I basically have my lesson plan typed out, with any music that I need (if it's from online) and then the teacher's names at the bottom. This obviously doesn't have all of my teaching methods on it, but it gives me a general idea of where we're going with the lesson. Then next to the teacher's names, I can quickly jot down any important notes about each class, and I'll know how to proceed for the next week.

While this is very functional, and is a lot more organized then I was last year, I want more from my system. First of all, I don't want to have to print out 6 pages each week (I like the sticky notes because they're very compact). Secondly, if I do print out each of these sets of lesson plans each week, how am I going to store them? I could put them into a 3 ring binder, but that would get a little crazy by the end of the year, unless I took out all my old lesson plans and replaced them, but I like the idea of having a whole year of ideas stored in one book. And lastly and probably most importantly, it's not cute looking! I really love the cutesy aspect of teaching at an elementary school, and it makes me sad that I don't get to do all of the cute art projects, so I'm trying to bring more cute stuff into my classroom. Including in my personal planner!

I'm probably going to stick with the boring printed lesson plan system for the first few weeks of school, but I think I'm going to try and customize a planner for myself. I know there are some websites out there where you can print your own planning pages, so I might have to do that, and build myself a binder that incorporates all the elements I want. If I manage to put something good together, I'll definitely post it up on here. I'm also hoping this week to make it part-way through my planning for the 3rd week of school. I have everything done for the 2nd week besides Kinder! Woot! Props for me. :)