Lesson plan templates and planners!

Happy Labor Day!  I'm hoping you're able to spend this last "official" day of summer doing something fun!  We're all sick in my house, so nothing fun for us :(

Last night on Twitter during the #tptchat, the topic of lesson plans and planners were brought up.  I have tried so many different ways to organize my planning, but I finally found a way that works for me!

This year, our school was given a new principal.  She's amazing!  However, she is requiring us to do and submit weekly lesson plans.  Ok, no big deal, right?  Well, we've never had to do it before!  This was a learning experience for all of us in the building who had been used to the former principal and what she wanted from us.  So, when the topic of lesson plans came up, I had a little minor freak out.  I have always had a general lesson plan book, but never as in depth as she wanted.  The guideline was "anyone who walks in could read your lesson plans and know 100% what to do." Again - freak out.  My plans worked for ME, but they weren't as in depth as she was talking about.

So, the general plan template I've always used, even when in Special Education, was this:

 Some of the bottom got cut off, but generally, this is what it looked like.  Super functional, and you could see a one-week spread just by opening the binder.  I still use this as my general layout.

Next, came the handwritten in-depth daily lesson plans.

I LOVED this format, because I used my Flair pens to color-code subjects!  It was a lot of work, but I stuck with it for 13 school days.

Now, having a 3 1/2 year old and 5 1/2 year old running around proved to be somewhat disastrous for my beautiful plans.  Water would get spilled, they would add a doodle here or there; they ended up looking like a hot mess sometimes and I would have to redo them.  It took me an average of 45 minutes to get them the way I wanted them!  I couldn't take that much time away from my kids to hand-write lesson plans.  It was way too stressful!

So, I went searching - TpT, Pinterest, Google, wherever I could just to get some sort of idea on what I wanted my new template to look like.  Rewind to a chat I had with my favorite frienducator, Meg, (A New Box of Crayons) about her lesson plan template.  I loved the look of it, I wanted one similar to it!  A coworker of ours actually made her template for her, and it is way more spiffy than mine! So, here is what I came up with:

Can you hear the angels singing and playing their harps as we speak or what?!!?  Holy buckets, friends!  This was a lifesaver!!  I can keep the font size super small if I need to (like 7 or 8, for reals), and use my favorite font (KG Architect's Daughter)... as Sheila Jane would say, "Winning!!"  I have been so blessed to meet Meg, and through Meg I met Sheila Jane, who is deserving of a blog post all her own!  (I will put this plug in for her before that post comes along, however, because her amazingness needs to be shared with the teaching world!! Sheila Jane Teaching, seriously, go check her out if you haven't already!!)

Ok, so there's my two cents on planning!  I hope you have found this helpful, and maybe took something away that you could use, or something to spark an idea!  Collaborating is my #1 favorite thing to do with fellow educators - we need each other, y'all!!

Have a fabulous rest of your day, and get some rest if you can!

Carli