My documentation process

Documentation is something that has become a natural piece of my job as a teacher. I am constantly taking notes about what my students are doing. It’s one of those things that I do without thinking, those notes are so important because I can take my scribbled notes and turn them into a polished documentation, having the notes already written down cuts my panel-making process in half.  Even though my notes save me tons of time, the role that I’m in at my new school doesn’t leave a ton of time for creating panels and other items that I really want to do for the classroom.

I’ve solved this problem by attempting to polish my notes so that I can post them as documentation, without cleaning them up as part of a panel.  I think this is a great solution because these notes are much more raw, they show how quickly I was writing, and give a lot more detail than my panels often do.  One thing that I’ve done to make sure that my notes are presentable is to start taking notes on the cute pages that were included in the awesome planner that I purchased at the beginning of the year from A Modern Teacher. I LOVE this planner, and these note pages are so cute that I don’t really care how horrible my handwriting is.

Because I have less time to refine all of my documentation on the computer, I’ve also created a Project Work Planner. This thing has printable pages for webbing, cute pages for note taking, a list of questions to ask while observing children, workbook pages for before, during, and after a field experience, and pages specifically for making lists (because that’s what I do best!).  It also has a section just for summarizing possible projects, to help get your thoughts in order, and documentation templates. I love this notebook and I wanted to share it with everyone! It is available here!

Project Work Planner