It’s time for a new planner!

One of my favorite things about July (besides my birthday, and the Fourth, and the gorgeous summer weather) has always been picking out a new planner. Yep, I’m a nerd – and proud of it!

 In Jr. High and High School I would get my school-issued planner and immediately start filling in important dates and color-coding pages.  In college, I started creating my own planners to make sure that the pages were set up how I wanted them and to make sure that I would have enough room to write down everything that I needed to do.

Over the last couple of years I’ve gone through planners like water because things have been changing so quickly. This year I decided that the best organizational strategy for me is to use a 3-ring binder. This way I can add or remove pages as I need them.  It also allows me to include information that I need for specific projects, and then take this info out and file it when I’m done working on that particular project.  The other great thing about using a binder is that I can combine aspects of two different planners, to create one that really works for me.

The two planners that I have combined are The Teacher Lesson Planner in gold by A Modern Teacher and the TPT Seller Planner by Crayonbox Learning. Both are available for instant download on Teachers Pay Teachers.

I started by splurging just a little on a Vera Bradley 3-Ring Binder. It’s bright and fun, plus its plastic so it’ll hold up for as long as I’m going to use it.  This binder also came with matching divider tabs.

Then I added calendar pages – I modified these just a little because they were designed to be a two-page spread, but I wanted the entire month on one page.

Then I added weekly pages. I separated each day into three parts – school, preschool ponderings, and personal. This lets me write out to do lists for each job every single day.

As if that didn’t leave enough space for my to-do lists, I printed extra list sheets, and separated those so that there was a list for each job.  I occasionally cross out the job titles and write other lists.

The next section in my binder is the TPT Seller Planner. I especially like the goals sheets, project planning sheets, and the expense record.  After the seller planner, the next tab in my binder is where I keep all of my sales records. I like having these with me because I can go back and look at each month any time.

The last section in my binder is a copy of the Ohio Early Learning Development Standards.  I work in tons of different places, and I was constantly pulling these up on my ipad – I use them when I write, plan lessons, and create resources, plus friends are always asking me what kinds of things are developmentally appropriate. Even though I know the standards pretty well, it is so nice to have a copy with me to refer to.