Teacher Planner

The NEVER ENDING Search For the PERFECT PLANNER

Every year I search for a planner that will do everything I want it to do. There are a ton of basic lesson planners. This one from Amazon has been one of my favs for years. It is great for lesson planning, but I didn't love that I didn't have a monthly layout and there wasn't room for anything else. 

I have heard amazing things about Erin Condren (that's a referral link), but there are so many sections I won't use. I am not going to keep track of 150 kids birthdays. More if we consider how many changes I have to my schedule! That also means I am not going to keep my gradebook, attendance or seating charts in my planner. I feel like the planner is FABULOUS for elementary teachers, decent for MS teachers but less than ideal for a "traditional" HS teacher with 150+ students. Combine that with the cost, and I just can't see paying $60 for a planner when I am not going to use all of it. Yet, I was drawn. There are cool pockets, colorful stickers and I do like the layout of the day by day. 

So, I decided to create my own planner. I looked on etsy, Teacher's Pay Teacher's and just kept thinking, that would be great IF...There were so many that were close to perfect and I got a zillion great ideas from looking around. I went through three drafts and this is what I came up with!

My Planner!

I have a friend designing cover art for me, awesome! I have our yearly calendar as well as two pages of bell schedules. Seriously it took two pages. We have SO MANY DIFFERENT schedules! I also need to add in our A/B Block Schedule, but I don't have that yet.

Cover and Yearly Schedule

The pages of schedules are followed by 43 weeks of this layout! It's undated (because I didn't want to risk printing something and making a mistake!). I teach two different preps a day, so the left side boxes will be used for one class and the right hand side first two blocks for the other class and then the far right side gives me a to-do column. The bottom green box will be for weekend (SPEECH!) plans, or a list of things to print, who knows. I left it blank so I can see how I want to use it. 

I did order the Erin Condren Colorful Date Dots and Event Stickers so I can use those on all these pages. :-)

So many of these pages. So much copying and pasting!

Then we go to the month by month. I wanted all the months to be together rather than split up by the weeks. Does that make sense? Most of the "week at a glance" type planners have a March month followed by all the March weeks. Then an April month followed by all the April weeks, etc. I wanted all the months together so I can see it all together for class timing. So I have August-June month layouts.

Monthly layouts for August-June

This last part was just for me. I was watching you-tube videos of HS teachers talking about how they used their planner to its fullest. Most, if not all, of them said there were sections they just didn't use. One woman said she used the attendance section to keep track, not of daily attendance, but of when kids missed assessments. I got to thinking that my biggest issue last year was keeping track of kids who missed quizzes/tests. I typically wouldn't notice until it was graded and in the gradebook (which in some instances was like 2 weeks!). I did have WAY more Freshmen than usual last year, and many of them were NOT GOOD at telling me they missed a quiz, so by the time I noticed we were past that curriculum, making it harder for them to make it up. So I designed these pages to keep track of kids who are absent on a test or quiz day. I have a column for their name. The second is an abbreviation of my three preps, so I can circle what class they are in. Then, what quiz/test it was, the day they missed, the day they SAY they will make it up and a check for WHEN it gets in. I might put the date I get it back in that column because I think that will be beneficial for parent meetings. :-)

Checklist for Missing Tests/Quizzes

I am hoping that all coil binds are the same because I also ordered (from Erin Condren) some dividers for all these sections as well as some of their CoilClip connectors. Super fun! I love office supplies!

PHEW! This was my third design and by far my fav. I found a wonderful local print shop who can print it, in color, for about $25 and coil bind it with a clear front color and black linen/plastic back. Would love any feedback before I submit it to the copy place!